Top SFX shots No.27: Blade Runner

Douglas Trumbull's work on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) took him out of the airless freedom of space and into the need to make flying saucers glow in the misty plains of Ohio. It was on CE3K that Trumbull perfected the very long exposures needed to get adequate and convincing depth-of-field in low-light conditions, combined with the use of a custom-built machine that dispersed fine oil mist into the air at a strictly regulated rate, which allowed the lights of the models to cut through a dense, Earth-like atmosphere. These techniques surfaced again in creating Philip K. Dick's bleak vision of the future for Ridley Scott, with flying police cars '('Spinners') floating through smog-drenched Los Angeles. Many beautiful city shots emerged, where Trumbull made the superimposition of stock rain footage realistic by obscuring areas of it that did not correspond to light sources in the background plate. For this shot Trumbull went the extra mile, and added a windshield with rain droplets as a foreground element to Deckard's journey to meet Eldon Tyrell. Such a shot should not have been possible in the days of photo-chemical SFX.

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