A Blade Runner tribute made from a giant image

François Vautier built one enormous PSB* file to create this short film:

Created by extracting 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’s final cut version, then assembling all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions : a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels. A virtual camera was then placed above this big picture which creates an illusion, because contrary to appearances, there is only one image. It is in fact the relative movement of the virtual camera flying over this massive image that creates the animated film, a kind of “zootrope effect”, like a film in front of a projector.
The whole concept echoes one of the signature scenes from the film where “Deckard” (Harrison Ford) analyzes a photograph via voice recognition software.


* Like PSD, but scaling beyond 2GB and meaning “Photoshop Big.” Yes, really.

5 thoughts on “A Blade Runner tribute made from a giant image

  1. speaking of .psb files it would be great if Lightroom would recognize them, at least as a database item. They will not import.
    not sure if this is technically possible? I’ll put it out there as a feature request.
    give me some perspective on a gigapixel. ??? How many TB?
    That is a really awesome photoshop file, Thanks to all that BASIC (ha-sarcastic) 3D introduction to Photoshop; I assume.

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