Purefold And The Blade Runner Replicants

Best. Concept. Development. Ever. Wired UK’s Katie Scott reports that uber-Director Ridley Scott is working up a web series called Purefold, which “will chart the period leading up to the era depicted in Blade Runner.” Quoting an MTV announcement:

“The plot will eventually carry into the film’s era, with the plot being shaped along the way based on audience feedback,” it reports.

MTV says that the series will not be “a continuation of the adventures of Rick Deckard, the doomed Rachel, Gaff, or the workings of the Tyrell Corporation” as RSA Films, the studio making the series, does not own the rights to these characters or the storyline.

Production company Ag8, run by David Bausola and Tom Himpe, has an even funkier description of the project’s inception and architecture:

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.

Purefold is supported by commercial and academic pillars, such FriendFeed, Creative Commons, WPP, Aegis, Publicis and Naked Communications.

Incept date for the first episode, according to Wired UK, is sometime “later this summer.”