Blade Runner origami for fun and frustration

Augh

Active Member
When you want to passive aggressively comment on your coworker's bumbling progress, nothing beats a snarky paper model left strategically in shot.

Gaff's origami models were always one of the coolest understated elements of Blade Runner, and what got me in to this hobby in the first place. I've been making the unicorns for some time, and while I've seen some really really nice cast replicas around the site, I'd love to see any and all efforts anyone has made in paper. Have you given it a shot? Would you like to? What models have you seen that made you think "Oh, Gaff would be all over that"? Show us!

Here's a couple of small efforts;

Traditional Unicorn.
2x 7.5cm x 7.5cm foilpaper.

gaffuni1.jpg gaffuni2.jpg

What's the matter, detective? You chicken?
1x 10cm x 10cm traditional origami paper, inverted.
I'm pretty sure Gaff made this with cigarette rolling paper, it looks that way and he appears to find the paper in an ashtray, but I roll with a really light gauge that wasn't standing up to the abuse. Then I discovered of all the varied and sundry papers I have, plain white is not among them. Chicken looks a bit weird since the pattern on the inside is showing through. Let's call it a grubby chicken, hadn't attempted this model before and it's a little strange, but really cool technically. Next time it might not turn out as Gaff's Off-balance Velociraptor.

gaffcluckcluck.jpg

Few more Unicorns in varying media;
HK $20, Screen correct foilpaper, US $1, remnants of said $1. The big guy behind is an unfinished from a design by Kamiya Satoshi, inverted tissue foil.

4skinjobs.jpg

I need to get hold of the Jun Maekawa diagrams so I can take a shot at Gaff's Sheep from 2049, that looks pretty fun too. It never occured to me to try hacking up some matchsticks, maybe I'll go at that now.
My phone camera is atrociously poor, and I have to desaturate the pictures cause that wall is that vile magnolia off yellow people insist on painting houses with, so sorry for both of those.

If you've anything to show of your own, however grand or modest, please give us a look!

Edit: Got hold of the Maekawa diagrams. Gaff's sheep in A4 cartridge paper.

metaphysics2.jpg metaphysics3.jpg
 
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Some learning, experiments, practise. The available diagrams certainly need a little adjustment in a few areas (legs mostly) to get more of Gaff's quite particular shape, and I think I found a reasonably reliable and reproducable way. The heads particularly got some variation due to trying different methods. It's so hard to see what he was up to even on a high resolution print. Obviously model to model variance is to be expected from this type of thing too.

11cm x 11cm tracing paper.

cluck.jpg

"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken." - Col. Harland David Sanders.
 
I saw! I hope you'll try again, people are tough on themselves with this stuff. Whoever did the folding for the original movie was definitely very good, and Gaff's unicorn still looks pretty damn rough. If you keep with it, you will see a rapid improvement in a bunch of areas, blood pressure included. I know you can do it.

It's pretty frustrating too not having better resources for documenting things. In your thread particularly people were lamenting the inverted step of the unicorn (seems it is 22-24 on the diagrams most are using). This can be done guaranteed without tears (or tears) in like 10 seconds but I don't really have a way to show the method for it. I would love to be able to demystify that one. Even a series of photos that one could actually glean anything from seems beyond my phone's camera.
 
It's pretty frustrating too not having better resources for documenting things. In your thread particularly people were lamenting the inverted step of the unicorn (seems it is 22-24 on the diagrams most are using). This can be done guaranteed without tears (or tears) in like 10 seconds but I don't really have a way to show the method for it. I would love to be able to demystify that one. Even a series of photos that one could actually glean anything from seems beyond my phone's camera.

Yeah, that's the biggest problem. It's really hard to show what you are doing, but once you figure it out it's like a lightbulb and seems really obvious.
 
Yeah that's pretty much exactly how it goes for me. After a couple repetitions of a given model, you'll often find ways to think backward and forward through neighbouring steps too, sometimes much further, and find more efficient or convenient ways to do previous steps, change their order for ease of access to part of the model later on, stuff like that. I'm not saying that diagrammed methods tend to be wrong, just there's always more than one way to skin two pigs with one stone. Usually diagrammed approaches are the best way to learn the model and get a solid grip on how it works and how to think about it.
Mike J. - A good even crane base (the sortof kite shaped stage) is like 90% of getting the chicken right. You'll certainly be able to do it, and that's the perfect place to start.
 
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This is cool to see different renditions in one thread. I made a unicorn a couple of years ago. I really don't have any origami experience, so I think I compared a diagram to a couple of videos to wrap my head around it. I did one oversized for practice and to figure out the correct paper size for the real one (which I think worked out to just be a quarter of the full sheet size I had). Then I think I did another practice one at actual size before this one. It's flawed, to be sure, but I found it a very satisfying project.

IMG_0972.jpg
 
I like it! For sure every one made has its own flaws, idiosyncracies and foibles (Gaff's has a ton), I don't think a "just right" one can exist, that's why they are so neat. Working at different scales has helped me a lot with all kinda different models too.

Nailing the exact scale is difficult for me with on camera things always, they tend to look giant to me regardless of the context. That looks very close to the scale I eventually decided on, which was 7.5cm on a side, but given that a person's thumb is a very varied metric, who can really be sure.
 
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