Christopher Grant Harvey spent the better part of five years making Tears In The Rain: A Blade Runner Short Film. Unwilling to settle for something merely average, Harvey labored away, especially in post-production, “trying to get the perfect original visual effects and [a] fitting score to bring the story to life.” Set in the world of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the motion picture Blade Runner (1982), Tears In The Rain is a loose prequel to Ridley Scott’s motion picture, and it’s also a “what if” story. It asks what “if a ‘Blade Runner’ retired a human by mistake, what happens then?”
Here’s more on the plot:
In a dystopian Los Angeles future, replicants or genetically engineered humanoids are created to work forced labour on off-world colonies. The latest generation, the Nexus 3 series, begins to display erratic and violent behaviour. Replicants were not designed to experience complex emotions or develop long-term memories. In the wake of corporate scandals of the previous decade, the Tyrell Corporation quietly attempts to remove Nexus 3 from circulation.
John Kampff (Sean Cameron Michael), a senior engineer, heads up the Tyrell Retirement Division. With the primary objectives, detect and remove Replicants, John has suspected Nexus 3 Andy Smith (Russel Savadier) firmly in his sights. As John soon learns, Replicant detection is nearly impossible without specialist equipment. The Voight-Kampff, a polygraph-like machine used by retirement engineers to help in the testing of an individual to learn if they are a replicant, is a distant thought in John Kampff’s mind.
The 11-minute film was made at a cost of $1500. Not too shabby. Find more information about Tears In The Rain here.
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Not a bad short film, but a Blade Runner would always question a suspected replica before executing him or her.
Wow… that was utterly STUPID. Don’t really wanna see the damned movie now. :/
Hi Shawn,
This is pre-Deckard and Nexus 6, the whole concept of this short film was to show the killing of a human by mistake. John Kampff, our main character would regret his decision and build a machine to help future Blade Runners detect Replicants. Make sense? :)
Regards,
Chris Harvey
the idea here is that John Kampff (the hunter’s surname as per description) is an engineer who retires a human by mistake — leading to him presumably developing the voight-kampff machine?
Nice but I felt they should have thought outside the box rather than going purely for nostalgia. Having the Harrison Ford and William Sanderson look-alikes is always going to make for pale imitations. Aside from that it makes a nice story. Andy Smith is definitely a special.
Amazing! I want more!
I admire the recreation of the original film’s ambience. I also like how Kampff might have really fucked up—you can see it in his eyes at the end—but he is determined to make his science certain as he keeps working. Eventually, to judge by the performance of the Voight-Kampff machine in “Blade Runner,” he gets closer to certainty. But, like an asymptote, there is never total certainty in his approach. Thanks for creating this short film. Ignore the haters.