A REPLICANT'S TALE

Or how to use screen captures and the dry brush filter to make something cool!

It is no secret to anyone who knows me that the movie "Blade Runner" (director's cut) is one of my favorites. A few months ago there was a contest on Something Awful. The goal was to mimic the cut scenes from the video game Max Payne using whatever picture you can find. In this game, the cut scenes are all regular photographs arranged in comic book style panels. The photographs are subjected to the "dry brush" filtering process in Photoshop. The process is simple, duplicate the original layer, apply the dry brush filter, and then reduce the opacity of the filtered layer.

All the other entries for the contest were quite hilarious. Someone made a comic sequence from screen caps of the 1960's Batman movie. The scene in question is when the Adam West Batman is running around carrying an over-sized spherical bomb and having difficulties trying to get rid of it because of all the people in the way. Add comic panels, hard-boiled style narration, and you have instant comedy. When it came time for me to step up to the plate, I decided to do something a little different.

Upon entering this contest, I had just watched Blade Runner for the umpteenth time. This movie always fascinated me, not because of the awesome special effects, or the interesting concept of a race of artificial being, but because of the character, Roy Batty. Roy is the leader of a group of Nexus 6 replicants who escaped from their assigned posts and have illegally traveled to Earth.

The thing to note about Roy Batty, and the replicants that he leads, is that they are not villains. The society of the future treats them as such, but the replicants are living human beings with the unfortunate flaw of being artificial. In addition to that flaw, replicants have a shortened life span of 6 years as a way to control them. Roy and his group of replicants are at the end of their life spans. The replicants come to Earth and try to infiltrate the company that created them in hopes to find a way to prevent their own premature deaths. The Nexus 6 replicants are fighting for survival.

But now onto my entry. Keep in mind that if you haven't seen the movie, this will certainly spoil it for you. So if you haven't seen the movie, GO AWAY!

I Used the monologue Roy gives right before his life is terminated by the incept date built into his design as the content for the narration panels. The comic panels themselves are all screen caps made from PowerDVD. Once I posted this, I got a lot of praise... but soon I realized that creating humor was the purpose of the contest. Apparently I made this particular piece a little too artsy. Oh well, take a look for yourself.

**click on image to view full size**

**click on image to view full size**