If Ridley Scott is willing to whore out the Alien universe in a prequel, why not Blade Runner? But wait! Before you start grumbling about his new project, Purefold, a web series set in the Blade Runner universe, there’s an intriguing aspect to it all. An aspect that may bring more grumbling.
Scott can’t use anything from Blade Runner in Purefold due to rights issues in regards to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it seems like there will be no mistaking this near future world. The webisodes are meant to eventually become a TV series and then… this is where it gets weird.
The entire series will be made under the Creative Commons license, which means anyone will be able to come along and remix, remake and remaster the episodes as they wish. That’s cool, but Scott’s going one step further and offering Purefold as a way for marketers to create brand integration. Here’s the full press release from Ag8 Studios, who is partnered with Scott Free on this:
Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.
With a central theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’, the franchise explores the subject of empathy – a shared theme with Ridley Scott’s most compelling Science Fiction movie, Blade Runner.
The franchise contains infinite interlinked story lines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films’ global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s leading ‘life streaming’ technology.
Taking place in the near future, Purefold enables participating brands to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.
Purefold content will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms unprecedented equal use rights through their participation.
So Ridley Scott is creating an open source web show set in the Blade Runner world… and he’s also opening it to advertisers. It’s all so cyberpunk.