Building the Blade Runner "Hades" Landscape

Remember when special effects were hard? Douglas Trumbull certainly does. Douglas designed many of the miniature sets for Blade Runner and his descriptions of how he built one of the most amazing sci-fi scenes ever

You can watch the whole six minute video here but it’s amazing how they had to build a miniature set and add rear-projected explosions to make something that would probably take a talented kid a few days to make in some of the more powerful 3D editors. Yet I still thing BR’s scene is more emotionally jarring than anything in Avatar.