Blade Runner 2049 Photoviewer Prop

The photo viewer was one of my favourite assets I have worked on for Blade Runner 2049 whilst I was at Territory back in 2016. I remember seeing a paper mockup at the meeting with the art department, but I have never seen the final product, nor it was featured in the theatrical cut of the film. After the film was released I was delighted to see the actual prop - I believe it was designed by Mike Hill - in the Adam Savage behind the scenes video with Doug Harlocker, and I’ve always wanted to create my own version of it. I just think having the UI design paired with a physical prop is always something cool, it lends a bit more realism to my FUI work.

I had two versions of the “software” developed, the greenish one was a feasibility study to see how the “zooming into the image” could work, and the brownish one featured Sapper’s house and the environment around it. The idea was that when you insert a picture into the scanner you’d be able to move around in a restricted 3d space within the image, and zoom into the important details.

The animation you see features a photogrammetry scan of a tree in the Mortlake cemetery, and some dodgy handwiting of mine... I used Cinema4D for the modelling, and the prop is a mixture of 3D printed and styrene modelled parts. The content is being played back by an iphone hidden in the main unit of the device.