Using just about any metric you can think of, it's safe to say that Blade Runner is one of the most visually stunning films of the past fifty years.
Ridley Scott's singular vision of the future, fusing old and new technologies and incredible production design, meshed on screen to create a watershed moment in filmmaking and films in general. It had depth, soul, a richly designed and textured approach to what you saw and it looked like nothing anyone had seen before or since.
So, how best to honour this monument to the visual arts? By recreating it in MS Paint.
David MacGowan has been reshooting 1982's Blade Runner using the primitive painting program and posting said images onto his Tumblr. As of writing, it looks like MacGowan's up to the part where Harrison Ford discovers a bit of dead snake in the bath-tub of Leon's apartment.
Why is he doing it? Who knows. In a interview with Motherboard, MacGowan explained that he "used to draw really crappy basic MS Paint pics for a favourite pop group's fan site, and they always seemed to raise a smile. The idea of doing something else with MS Paint, a kind of celebration of my not being deterred by lack of artistic talent, never really went away."
The images, such as they are, having drawn something of an audience and feeds into the sort of Internet Ugly aesthetic that's become more and more popular in recent months.
Here's a selection of a few paintings from David's Tumblr so far.
You can follow his progress on msp-blade-runner.tumblr.com.
Via Motherboard
