In 1981, filming began for Blade Runner. Douglas Trumbull’s Entertainment Effects Group was chosen to handle the special effects.

In Douglas Trumbull’s presentation of Blade Runner, he was introduced by Professor Larry Burke, Simon’s Rock College’s professor of film studies and digital video production. Mr. Trumbull’s lecture included slides of a behind-the-scenes look of Blade Runner, and selections from On the Edge of Blade Runner, the Channel 4 documentary, in which Mr. Trumbull was interviewed. The following are excerpts from his lecture.

“Ridley was trying to make this evasive movie. When I first met him I was completely amazed by him. He is quite an artist and production designer, a writer, and a director. We would go to dinner once in a while and talk about this movie. He would start sketching things on napkins. He is a really fine artist. He can express himself very, very clearly to those who work with him. So, it was possible to get a very clear idea of what he wanted. But, one of the problems he had was a very limited budget. The way the movie was put together was completely unknown to me, but, we were told that the money available to do the visual effects on this movie would be a fraction of what we've been able to spend on Close Encounters. We said we'll do our best. The shop list that we first developed which was probably like a hundred and fifty shots. Close Encounters had three hundred and fifty shots. And we thought, we'll try to fill in the missing gaps in the movie. And that later got pared down to about eighty-five shots. And then later grew back up to a larger number of shots.

“One of the stories is that it was a very unhappy production for the live action crew, and for Ridley. He was new to the United States, and it was his first film directing with an American crew. He was not getting along at all with the crew. They were trying to second guess him a lot. He was trying to do this extraordinary visual thing. But, no one understood why he needed weird lights, heavy smoke, always shooting at night, and shooting in the rain all the time. It made everybody really cranky. Fortunately, for the visual effects crew, we didn't happen to experience much of that. We had a great time. I really enjoyed working for Ridley. My partner, Richard Yuricich, enjoyed it.

“This movie benefits from the fact that, in the making of Close Encounters, we have already developed a lot of [the] technology, cameras, lenses, lights, and smoke rooms that created these tremendous atmospheric effects. So, it's helpful to explain a little bit about Close Encounters because that is where we developed this whole idea of a smoke room. If you can imagine that the density of smog in Los Angeles in 2019 is going to be pretty heavy, and you're only going to be able to see a few blocks. If you make a miniature of that 1/10th of the scale of reality, you have to make the smog ten times denser than reality. So we live, in our special effects world, in dense smoke all the time. And we have this black velvet room, with this big air circulation system. And an automated smoke generating machine with a little laser beam that ran the length of the room and metered, automatically, the amount of smoke in the room so the level of smoke remained constant for hours on end, because we're shooting only one frame every few seconds. We were using techniques that we call motion control. Anything that's moving in this movie has to go through some motions many times over. Because, if a vehicle fly’s by over head, whether it's a blimp or a spinner, that's usually five to seven separate exposures into one piece of film. So that has to fly by the camera exactly the same way five to seven different times in perfect synchronism. And so, we have a lot to do with developing this motion control, being able to do complicated movements that we were unable to do before, or up to, 2001. And so, the fact that we had all this weird gimmickry, the smoke room and special lighting rigs, make these look huge. Like my favorite scene in the movie, when this advertising blimp flies over the Bradbury building, that's really Close Encounters equipment. “

“The opening scene, what we call Hades Landscape, this kind of Hellish Los Angeles, was made up of quite a few different components. A photographer and I went down to El Segundo, California to this maze of endless petroleum cracking plants. We went down there with still cameras and photographed several thousand photographs of these silhouettes of these weird towers and strange tubes, and started building up an idea for this landscape which was going to be made up of layers and layers and layers of little silhouetted microscopically small buildings. “

Missing Slide

“This is the camera looking down toward the horizon. And off in the distance would be two weird pyramid buildings, with truncated tops. And that was going to be the Tyrell building, the major office building of the android manufacturing company.”

Missing Slide

“This was a force-prospected miniature where the foreground pieces were quite large then they tapered off smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So you got these tiny like one inch small photographs of those cracking plants, which we had etched in brass. We built these tables with thousands of little layers of brass. The table was about ten feet deep, and about 15 feet wide. And all the brass were painted black. And then there were these hundreds of bundles of fiber optics coming up from under the table to light this whole thing up. We knew, from Close Encounters, that once you enter this light into smoke you start getting all this weird refractive layers that anything in front of anything in front of anything creates different layers of atmospheric distance. And it would tend to make these little tiny things look really huge. Immense.”