Tags: blade

13 Wednesday, August 5th, 2020

Design maturity on the Clearleft podcast

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is zipping through the RSS tubes towards your podcast-playing software of choice. This is episode five, the penultimate episode of this first season.

This time the topic is design maturity. Like the episode on design ops, this feels like a hefty topic where the word “scale” will inevitably come up.

I talked to my fellow Clearlefties Maite and Andy about their work on last year’s design effectiveness report. But to get the big-scale picture, I called up Aarron over at Invision.

What a great guest! I already had plans to get Aarron on the podcast to talk about his book, Designing For Emotion—possibly a topic for next season. But for the current episode, we didn’t even mention it. It was design maturity all the way.

I had a lot of fun editing the episode together. I decided to intersperse some samples. If you’re familiar with Bladerunner and Thunderbirds, you’ll recognise the audio.

The whole thing comes out at a nice 24 minutes in length.

Have a listen and see what you make of it.

Friday, January 3rd, 2020

Blade Runner Sketchbook (PDF)

I was sad to hear of the passing of Syd Mead last week. Here’s a sketchbook of his remarkable work for Blade Runner.

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’: A Game-Changing Science-Fiction Classic • Cinephilia & Beyond

A nexus of hypermedia on all things Blade Runner, from links to Tumblr blogs to embedded screenplays, documentaries, and scanned images.

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017

This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017 | Tor.com

If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

A thought-provoking first watch of Blade Runner …with an equally provocative interpretation in the comments:

The tragedy is not that they’re just like people and they’re being hunted down; that’s way too simplistic a reading. The tragedy is that they have been deliberately built to not be just like people, and they want to be and don’t know how.

That’s what really struck me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: the tragedy is that these people can’t take action. “Run! Leave! Go!” you want to scream at them, but you might as well tell someone “Fly! Why don’t you just fly?”

Saturday, September 2nd, 2017

What Blade Runner is about, and the Narcissist Creator Razor ( 1 Sep., 2017, at Interconnected)

George Lucas, Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Stoppard, William Shakespeare, and Ridley Scott are all part of Matt’s magnificent theory that the play is the thing.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are replicants.

Characters look like people, except they exist for only the duration of a movie — only while they are necessary. They come with backstory and memories fully established but never experienced, partly fabricated for the job and partly drawn from real people known by the screenwriter. At the end, they vanish, like tears in rain.