Watch Tears In the Rain: A Blade Runner Short Film–A New, Unofficial Prequel to the Ridley Scott Film

Christo­pher Grant Har­vey spent the bet­ter part of five years mak­ing Tears In The Rain: A Blade Run­ner Short Film. Unwill­ing to set­tle for some­thing mere­ly aver­age, Har­vey labored away, espe­cial­ly in post-pro­duc­tion, “try­ing to get the per­fect orig­i­nal visu­al effects and [a] fit­ting score to bring the sto­ry to life.” Set in the world of Philip K. Dick­’s nov­el Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep? (1968) and the motion pic­ture Blade Run­ner (1982), Tears In The Rain is a loose pre­quel to Rid­ley Scot­t’s motion pic­ture, and it’s also a “what if” sto­ry. It asks what “if a ‘Blade Run­ner’ retired a human by mis­take, what hap­pens then?”

Here’s more on the plot:

In a dystopi­an Los Ange­les future, repli­cants or genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered humanoids are cre­at­ed to work forced labour on off-world colonies. The lat­est gen­er­a­tion, the Nexus 3 series, begins to dis­play errat­ic and vio­lent behav­iour. Repli­cants were not designed to expe­ri­ence com­plex emo­tions or devel­op long-term mem­o­ries. In the wake of cor­po­rate scan­dals of the pre­vi­ous decade, the Tyrell Cor­po­ra­tion qui­et­ly attempts to remove Nexus 3 from cir­cu­la­tion.

John Kampff (Sean Cameron Michael), a senior engi­neer, heads up the Tyrell Retire­ment Divi­sion. With the pri­ma­ry objec­tives, detect and remove Repli­cants, John has sus­pect­ed Nexus 3 Andy Smith (Rus­sel Savadier) firm­ly in his sights. As John soon learns, Repli­cant detec­tion is near­ly impos­si­ble with­out spe­cial­ist equip­ment. The Voight-Kampff, a poly­graph-like machine used by retire­ment engi­neers to help in the test­ing of an indi­vid­ual to learn if they are a repli­cant, is a dis­tant thought in John Kampf­f’s mind.

The 11-minute film was made at a cost of $1500. Not too shab­by. Find more infor­ma­tion about Tears In The Rain here.

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via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book Fea­tures The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead & Rid­ley Scott (1982)

Blade Run­ner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982