Flix for Short: Blade Runner Aquarelle Edition

And the award for remarkable persistence goes to Swedish artist Anders Ramsell. He’s recreated 12 minutes of Blade Runner using 3,285 individual aquarelles placed sequentially over the film’s audio. (In case you were wondering, an aquarelle is a drawing done in transparent watercolors.) For sheer volume and gall, it dwarfs Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

Ramsell worked on these pieces between March 2011 and January 2012, and the results are stunning in a somewhat disorienting way. It’s like seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or watching c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these little moments from Blade Runner frozen in time, in images like tears in rain.

Ramsell is apparently doing this for the whole film. Now, if my math is correct (it probably isn’t) there are roughly 27,000-28,000 aquarelles and nine years to go. Good luck, Ramsell. I owe you noodles if I ever see you in person.