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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

openculture carries an article [openculture.com] on the miniature props used in making Blade Runner:

Blade Runner, unlike most science-fiction movies of the 1980s, improves with age — in fact, it seems to hold up more robustly with each passing year. Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? endures for many reasons, none of them quite so strong as the richness of its setting, a vision of 2019 Los Angeles replete with fire-belching smokestacks, towering corporate obelisks, 30-story geishas glowingly endorsing products on the sides of buildings, and crumbling “old” architecture retrofitted to inhabit this simultaneously glossy and ramshackle reality.

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“Take a look at the dystopian miniatures, each tiny car hand painted with future dirt from riding clouds stuffed with future smog,” writes [io9.com] io9’s Meredith Woerner. Partisans of these sorts of techniques argue that miniatures remain superior to digital constructions because of their perceptible physicality, and perhaps that very quality has helped keep the look and feel of Blade Runner relatively timeless. Plus, unlike CGI, it gives die-hard fans something to hope for. If you dream about owning a piece of the film for your very own, you theoretically can; just make sure to do your homework first by reading the threads at propsummit.com [soylentnews.org], a forum about — and only about — Blade Runner props.

In a world where 3D printing is reality, will (good quality) miniature props make a comeback in movies?

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Spoiler: the photo gallery [imgur.com] without cultural opinions

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