It's a test designed to provoke an emotional response.

June 18, 2012 11:56 AM

Blade Runner: Aquarelle Edition
posted by OverlappingElvis (35 comments total)

Interesting top comment:

It's an interesting segment, but I gotta beg you not to continue. Artistic exercises are important. But if you attempt the whole movie, you will put a lot of effort into something that has no artistic voice of its own. The visuals in Blade Runner matter a LOT. Presenting an interpretation of those visuals is interesting. It gives an opportunity to see what you think is important in the work. But you can't say anything for yourself with this. Take the knowledge from this test and move on.

I think that might be the least stupid comment on Youtube.
posted by scose at 12:07 PM on June 18, 2012 [20 favorites]

The visuals in Blade Runner matter a LOT.

If only we could see them.
posted by DU at 12:10 PM on June 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

"It's an interesting segment, but I gotta beg you not to continue. Artistic exercises are important. But if you attempt the whole movie book, you will put a lot of effort into something that has no artistic voice of its own. The visuals writing in Blade Runner Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? matter[s] a LOT. Presenting an interpretation of those visuals that writing is interesting. It gives an opportunity to see what you think is important in the work. But you can't say anything for yourself with this. Take the knowledge from this test and move on."

posted by griphus at 12:14 PM on June 18, 2012 [11 favorites]

Couldn't this be automated with a Photoshop plugin or something. Freeze a frame, watercolor it for desired effect, replicate. Hard to know if this was human or machine.
posted by stbalbach at 12:14 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've never seen a Photoshop filter that could imitate aquarelle like that. That and all the differences in the objects -- check out the eye-scanner shift about -- between frames would mean a tremendous amount of work going into that.
posted by griphus at 12:18 PM on June 18, 2012

Couldn't this be automated with a Photoshop plugin or something. Freeze a frame, watercolor it for desired effect, replicate. Hard to know if this was human or machine.

If this segment is a replicant, perhaps Youtube will retire it.
posted by grobstein at 12:20 PM on June 18, 2012

It gives an opportunity to see what you think is important in the work. But you can't say anything for yourself with this.

I don't really get how these two sentences are supposed to work together.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:22 PM on June 18, 2012 [3 favorites]

I like the impressionistic, ghost-like effect that it lends to the story's characters, an interesting take given the film is asks what it is about a person that makes them real. Everyone is a shadow, here. Nice find.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:23 PM on June 18, 2012

Gave me a headache after 2 minutes.
posted by TDavis at 12:27 PM on June 18, 2012

Interesting that Ridley Scott's production company, Scott Free, uses a similar technique.

Hard to know if this was human or machine.

I hear there's a test for that.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:32 PM on June 18, 2012 [6 favorites]

Gave me a headache after 2 minutes.

Yeah, I felt travel sick
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:39 PM on June 18, 2012

This reminds me of an idea I had a few years ago for an extremely decadent video game setup in the future where a wealthy gamer could hop into a space ship, accelerate to significantly relativistic speeds, and then take advantage of the time distortion to play a video game at 60 frames per second where each frame was a hand-painted work by someone back on Earth. The gamer's computer would send client side data back to the planet, the plain in-engine rendering of that next sixtieth of a second of resulting graphical data would go to one of the painters, they'd do up a nice oil rendering according to whatever the graphical stylebook for that game and gamer was, that'd get photographed, and the frame would be sent back up to the gamer's ship, all within the gamer's subjective experience of that sixtieth of a second.

Didn't occur to me that said gamer might want to take a break and watch some Netflix, but why not?
posted by cortex at 12:40 PM on June 18, 2012 [18 favorites]

You've done a man's job, sir.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 1:08 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

But the relativistic distortion works both ways, unfortunately. Your gamer would see the Earth crawling along in slow motion, and the Earth would see him doing the same thing. The earth's reference frame only "wins" in the end because the space ship has to decelerate and stop.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:11 PM on June 18, 2012

Griphus, I think I know what you mean, but I do want to point out that Blade Runner is only really, really loosely based on DADoES. An aquarellization of Blade Runner, by contrast, would be a pretty slavish reframing, and one without any obvious transformation in meaning. It's mostly a leeching out of creating detail, like watching with your glasses off. The original comment seems to me to be pretty well on the mark.
posted by lodurr at 1:23 PM on June 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

That and you'd need FTL to get your inputs sent to the painters, and the paintings sent back, in an "interactive" time-frame...
posted by jepler at 1:26 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hey, hey, I'm writing a heavyhanded dystopian classist allegory here, not a physics textbook. It doesn't have to work, it just has to sound simultaneously neat and appalling.

Plus, think how awesome the screenshots would look when you and your LAN buddies took a break after a few hours to get some beers from the great, great, great, great grandson of the guy who ran the bar before you started playing!
posted by cortex at 1:29 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't really get how these two sentences are supposed to work together.

It means that all he's likely to accomplish is to show us what he likes about it. It's a wholly derivative work, and as such, there are at the very least pretty severe constraints on what you can do in terms of presenting your own creative vision.

As I've noted, this is pretty fundamentally different from adapting a script (and especially as radical an adaptation as Scott did on Dick). It's not without value, and I'm sure it was very important to the person who did it. But unless that person can explain some point they're trying to make, it's fair to question why they want to do a straight-up rotoscope of an existing work.

If they were introducing new material or new interpretations it would be different. I see no indication they're doing that.
posted by lodurr at 1:29 PM on June 18, 2012

But unless that person can explain some point they're trying to make, it's fair to question why they want to do a straight-up rotoscope of an existing work.

I think this is accurate, but functions much more as a conversation-beginning question mark rather than the conversation-ending period that you seem to mean by it. What is this work doing? Without having seen the completed film, obviously, I'm already interested in it because of the questions about process and product that it makes me ask: What value do we apply to derivative works that nonetheless require severe effort? In an art environment in which our only context for a painting is, pretty much, a static image, what value do we assign to a painting that is one of several thousand, none of which is meant to stand alone? What is the relationship, in film, between the visual and the audial? What happens when we consider a narrative film on a frame-by-frame basis?
posted by shakespeherian at 1:35 PM on June 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

Let me tell you, in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:35 PM on June 18, 2012 [3 favorites]

I don't mean it as a period, I'm really just defending what I take to be the YouTube commenter's meaning. It seemed to me to merit more than some snarky dismissals. I'll also defend someone's right to make a grand quixotic gesture such as rotoscoping an entire pretty long movie. But I'll almost certainly never get beyond the teaser, because I just don't see any likelihood of getting beyond the idiosyncratic aesthetic reframing to tell me something that's really interesting to me.
posted by lodurr at 1:46 PM on June 18, 2012

Obviously one reason to do this is simply to gain a lot of practice with watercolor itself. Undoubtedly he'll be better at water color after doing this then before.

Other then that, I don't know if there's too much value in it.

Now, let me tell you about my mother...
posted by delmoi at 2:06 PM on June 18, 2012

I remember being really sympathetic toward leon in that scene when I first saw it. I mean, the guy was obviously disturbed and traumatized, and you had to go talking about turtle-killing and reminding him of the fact that he doesn't have a mother....
posted by lodurr at 2:08 PM on June 18, 2012

Couldn't this be automated with a Photoshop plugin or something. Freeze a frame, watercolor it for desired effect, replicate. Hard to know if this was human or machine.

I see what you did there.
posted by odinsdream at 3:07 PM on June 18, 2012

I heard the guy's basement flooded a few weeks after he finished scanning in the paintings, and now all these watercolors are lost, like tears in the rain.
posted by cortex at 3:27 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

I like the idea. But there's a technical aspect to the execution that falls short. The stop motion, jumpy effect means that we're visually reorienting the image literally every second. This is why some folks up thread are complaining of headaches. If the images faded into each other this might be more watchable.
posted by quadog at 4:17 PM on June 18, 2012

I apologize for saying this, but I like it.
posted by spbmp at 4:33 PM on June 18, 2012

In cinematography, you start with a black frame and add light. In watercolour, you start with a white page and work the other way. In this instance, I don't know if the twain meet.
posted by Trochanter at 4:48 PM on June 18, 2012

Blade Runner is my favorite movie of all time, but this does nothing for me. I appreciate the effort, but it's as discomfiting as those deliberately wiggly line drawing animations that were popular a while back: the medium overwhelms the message.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:58 PM on June 18, 2012

I think this is awesome, but the lack of contrast makes it hard to really appreciate. Pity the artist doesn't work in oils. But, either way, this is cool.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:30 PM on June 18, 2012

The thing that gets me is that these are really poor paintings. I wouldn't expect much when he needs to do a thousand of them, and I am not sure if maybe this is what aquarelles always look like, but my initial reaction was that they were rushed and shoddy looking.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:41 PM on June 18, 2012

I had to give up about two minutes in due to the jerky transitions. Interesting project, but they are just shadowy interpretations of the movie itself.
posted by arcticseal at 8:44 PM on June 18, 2012

Wow, harsh crowd. Someone does some 3k paintings that lovingly-yet-abstractly communicate the essential atmosphere and facial elements/expressions of 12 minutes of a classic film, and the person who did is criticized for visual choppiness, lack of contrast, the medium overwhelming the message, the fact that it's watercolor instead of oil . . . ? For crying out loud, this is an art project (presumably involving an an attempt at blurring the lines between mechanical and human representation, as suggested by a couple of comments above), not an attempt to reproduce the original cinematic experience as faithfully as possible.
posted by treepour at 11:28 PM on June 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've never seen a Photoshop filter that could imitate aquarelle like that. That and all the differences in the objects -- check out the eye-scanner shift about -- between frames would mean a tremendous amount of work going into that.

It could certainly be done. I implemented a rudimentary form of automatic watercolorization way back in 1997. It's also not terribly hard to generate brushstrokes that look and feel handmade: I did it for a short film in 1995, and brushstroke-generation techniques have only improved since then.

It could be done that way, but I'm quite sure this was done by hand.
posted by otherthings_ at 4:07 AM on June 19, 2012

It was interesting, but also headache inducing for me. I was thinking it would possibly be a lot cooler if it simply faded between frames. It would seem to go with the vibe.
posted by bongo_x at 5:16 PM on June 19, 2012