Blade Runner spawns a web series

The greatest movie of all time is Blade Runner. I’ve said it before and nothing yet has changed my mind. No, not even Avatar, which today toppled Titanic as the biggest grossing movie ever. I’m so pleased that a sci-fi movie has replaced Titanic in that spot.

Anyway, back to Blade Runner. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, has announced that there’s a new division of his commercials company (RSA Films) working on a web series called “Purefold”. The series will be a bunch of linked 5 to 10 minute short films, initially targeted at the web under a Creative Commons licence.

Given that the movie took its inspiration from the Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, and given that Scott and co. don’t have rights to that book, they can’t actually make a Blade Runner series. The episodes are set prior to the 2019 date of the movie and will be “inspired by Blade Runner.”

Says David Bausola, founding partner of Ag8, the independent studio working with Scott, “We don’t take any of the canon or copyrighted assets from the movie. It’s actually based on the same themes as Blade Runner. It’s the search for what it means to be human and understanding the notion of empathy.”

I can’t help thinking that they’re pretty much using the Blade Runner name to get attention for a near future series that doesn’t really have much of anything to do with the movie or Dick’s book. The use of the Creative Commons licence is interesting though, giving fans the chance to remix and redistribute the films, making the whole concept a very public domain exercise. Scott and co. are also planning to use viewer input on storylines, using the FriendFeed website.

Sounds like an interesting concept, worth keeping an eye on.

(Sources: Dogmatic, New York Times.)

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This entry was posted on January 26, 2010 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Fantastic Fiction, Movies, Sci-Fi, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.