The magic of miniatures
In terms of special effects we wanted to film Slice Of Life almost the same way as the original Blade Runner and other 80's films were filmed. So, no CGI – just miniatures!!!
We spent a lot of time in the workshop building the city; buildings, platforms, vehicles etc.
To fabricate the city you need a lot of different buildings, and we tried to build them in various shapes and sizes. We used old computers, printers, TVs, cardboard packaging and similar stuff. There's tons of useful materials in everyday objects. After detailing, the paint blends everything together nicely, and small LED lights give life to the buildings.
We wanted to pay hommage to Blade Runner miniature team by recreating some of their work, and we decided to recreate one of their more obscure buildings – The Sushi Bar. They threw it together very quickly, and used it only as a background building. However, in Slice Of Life we decided to use it as the main location where most of the film takes place. It's a little known fact that they used a plastic water bottle for the miniature, so naturally - we did the same.
For the huge advertising billboards we wanted to use real projections. In a way because that's how it was done in the 80's, but also because if you film something with a camera it's going to look much better than if it was added digitally. So we needed to design and animate a dozen of different advertisements, and then we project them on the buildings. It can't get more analogue than that.
