Do Androids Dream?
A title sequence for Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" — the book that inspired Blade Runner. Rather than recreating the dark, rain-soaked aesthetic everyone expects, I went in the opposite direction: a stark, high-contrast yellow-and-black graphic style that feels closer to Saul Bass than Ridley Scott.
Category
Motion Design
Year
2023
Role
Director, Designer, Animator
Timeline
~45 seconds
Tools
After Effects, Illustrator
The Concept
Every adaptation of Philip K. Dick's world defaults to the same visual language: neon, fog, rain, darkness. I wanted to ask: what does this story look like if you strip away the atmosphere and reduce it to its most graphic elements?
The answer was a two-color world. Bright yellow and deep black — nothing else. The yellow represents the artificial, the synthetic, the electric. The black represents the void. Together they create a world that feels simultaneously stark and overwhelming. The limited palette forces the viewer to focus on shape, movement, and composition.
Visual Language
The sequence's central visual element is a dystopian skyline — a jagged silhouette of towers and industrial structures rendered as flat black vector shapes against the yellow sky. A lone silhouetted figure appears against the massive cityscape — the emotional core of the sequence: one person dwarfed by the built environment.
Throughout the sequence, subtle chromatic aberration effects at the edges of vector shapes add a sense of instability and electronic interference. The world looks slightly misaligned, like it's being viewed through a synthetic lens.
Motion & Pacing
The sequence moves through three acts in under a minute. Act 1: the title builds word by word on a flat yellow field. Act 2: the cityscape enters and credits play against it. Act 3: the perspective shifts dramatically — pulled into the city along a converging road as the sun rises and beams radiate outward.
The deliberately anti-Blade Runner aesthetic was a statement about adaptation itself: that a source material this rich deserves more than one visual interpretation.