When catching a contemporary Hollywood movie like ‘Blade Runner 2049’ at the theater, it’s easy to assume nearly everything we see is CGI, but a new video from the famed Weta Workshop gives us an inside look at the incredible miniature world they created for the film. They bring Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi vision of Los Angeles even further into terrifying focus through the lens of director Ridley Scott, showing how the city evolved over the decades that have ensued since the original 1982 film took place.

The city is now blanketed by smog, constant rain and snow from extreme pollution of the entire earth. The Weta design team built upon the original film’s classic aesthetic, making the architecture even more doom and gloom than it was before, and exploring the ways in which the polluted atmosphere affects residents of the city, even at ground level.

Weta artists conceived, built and hand-painted the miniature sets, creating an entire fictional L.A. that’s terrifying and amazing all at once. The centerpiece of the set is the LAPD building, which has come to loom villainously over the rest of the city. The miniature for this particular structure is 16 feet tall, so large and heavy, they had to build it lying down and lift it into vertical position with a chain block.

As noted on Weta’s Instagram, each and every shot of the city (led by cinematographer Alex Funke) “represents many, many hours of meticulous setup and painstaking attention to every detail.”

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“During the film’s production, Weta Workshop was brought on to build large miniatures for many of the key environments. The sequences had been worked out in pre-vis, but required a detailed design pass to imbue the environments with life and realism, these concepts were used as a guide for the miniature teams. Extreme weather, tropical storms, and tsunamis are commonplace in 2049, leaving coastal cities destroyed. Mostly abandoned, the cities are now wastelands, occupied only by scavengers and those that were unable to escape.”

The science fiction of the past thirty years has evolved beyond the midcentury’s optimistic space-age visions into a darker, grittier place, where technology is out of control and resources are running out. Whether you think these imagined dystopian futures are overly dramatic or prescient of harder times to come, their depiction of our downfall can be absolutely riveting, and worth watching for the urban scenery alone. Short films offer an ideal medium for filmmakers of all skill levels to explore these concepts, including architecture that’s taken on a life of its own and high-tech surveillance societies.

In fact, if you want to know what sci-fi films might be coming out in the next few years, keep an eye on the digital shorts that are proliferating across the internet, as many of them get snapped up by major studios to become full-length features.

Spatial Bodies by AUJIK

Architecture in Osaka, Japan takes on a life of its own and begins to grow organically like vines and trees in the short ‘Spatial Bodies’ by AUJIK. “Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos,” say the creators, a collective referring to itself as a ‘mysterious nature/tech cult.’

Megalomania by Factory Fifteen

From digital film studio Factory Fifteen, which has produced a number of striking shorts set in the future, Megalomania imagines a world in which cities are constantly in active construction mode. “The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of infrastructure and capital, evolving the appearance of progress into the sublime.”

TEARS OF STEEL by Ian Hubert/Blender Institute

This Creative Commons-licensed short made entirely with free and open source software was made in the Netherlands by the Blender Institute, which crowd-sources funding in online communities of 3D artists and animators. In ‘Tears of Steel,’ a group of warriors and scientists gathered at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk attempt to stage a crucial event from the past in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots.

The Sand Storm by Jason Wishnow and Christopher Doyle

Starring Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei, ‘The Sand Storm’ by Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle and director Jason Wishnow examines a dystopian future that’s not so far away, where society is facing water shortages and technology is not as helpful as we might hope.

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Urban Dystopia 11 Short Sci Fi Films Set In Future Cities

Instead of stretching upward toward increasingly polluted skies, could the solution to land scarcity issues in places like Singapore be found in subterranean development? Like something out of a dystopian film, this proposal by a student at Bartlett School of Architecture envisions a sort of mole city with inverted skyscrapers digging deep below street level, an extreme excavation of massive caverns and “a complex and continuously self expanding network of green canyons, tunnels, reservoirs and exploratory excavations into the granite rock below.”

If you look at the sci-fi we humans have been producing for the past half-century, many of us have already accepted a future in which living on the surface of the Earth is no longer viable, whether that means we will have to build vertical cities, float on the oceans or leave the planet altogether. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that a combination of climate change, pollution, overdevelopment and overpopulation would push us into building underground wherever possible, as well. This proposal by Finbarr Fallon envisions Singapore starting to plan the project by the year 2020, celebrating the idea before ultimately tearing it down and highlighting its many flaws.

Fallon presents Singapore 2065 as a darkly cinematic short film, with an engineer from the Subterranean Development Institute explaining how and why the development came about. The film takes us on a tour of the ‘World’s Greatest Engineering Feat’ and its luxurious architecture, which is clearly targeted at the well-to-do. The presentation seems fairly straightforward, but watch it all the way to the end for an unexpected plot twist.

“The film follows a documentary created by the state led, Subterranean Development Institute which looks behind the scenes of the world’s largest construction project, from a highly corporate and nationalistic point of view,” says Fallon. “This concludes with spectacular scenes of celebration where the National Day Parade is reconfigured from traditional military use, to a choreographed march of robotic construction technology through the underground city.”

“The documentary however, is interrupted by a subversive protagonist (the author), who gains access to secretive parts of the network by discovering hidden cave networks. This acts as a counter point critique to the corporate led masterplan, forming a social commentary on the ethics of large scale infrastructural projects and the resulting consequences, such as the exploitation of foreign workers.”

Humans have created a vast population of robotic workers to take on the tasks that they no longer want to carry out themselves, resulting in a disenchanted robot underclass that that takes over the Brixton area of South London. This is the premise of an incredible short film called ‘Robots of Brixton’ by Factory Fifteen, a collective of six animators based in London.

Each of the six members of Factory Fifteen created their own short film for the premiere of their animation company in 2011, and ‘Robots of Brixton’ is the work of Brixton-born-and-bred Kibwe Tavares. The film, which is magnificently detailed and filled with towering fantasy architecture, echoes the real-life riots that took place in the neighborhood in 1981.

All six members of Factory Fifteen graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, and that education shows in Tavares’ layered, chaotic tapestry of parasitic buildings that have multiplied over the city’s existing architecture.

Envisioning an urban future in which hopeful expectations of dazzling technology have been replaced with the harsh realities of war, discontent and decay, Robots of Brixton focuses on the lives of two robot protagonists.

“When people imagine cities in the future, they think of flying cars and brand new everything,” Tavares tells Glass Magazine. “But if you look around London, old is meshed with new and buildings which are hundreds of years old sit alongside buildings which are 50 years old, which sit alongside contemporary stuff. In fifty years time, most of the fabric of Brixton will remain the same, which is why I concentrated on additions”.