The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing(randsinrepose.com)
105 pointsby ExMachina733 hours ago13 comments
  • ilamont20 minutes ago
    Well, besides the language and the typeface, the other element of this sequence at the beginning of Blade Runner that makes it so special is the accompanying score by Vangelis, and the sound effects that start with twinkling computer notes and gradually build in volume to explosions and the whoosh of futuristic vehicles. It immediately immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.
    • ColdStreama minute ago
      It was only a few months back that I found out that Vangelis couldn't read or write music notation. He would just improv play and record on a tape, recording additional parts and mixing as needed. If he needed to have other musicians involved, then he would hire someone to listen back and write down the notation.

      Considering he recorded something like 35 albums, he was doing something right.

  • roughly4 minutes ago
    I’m actually curious if they made these black on white and then inverted it in post - the red is a little too deep, and there’s some interesting shadowing on the text, whereas if you invert the video, it’s incredibly crisp. Hard to really tell after 40 years and a YouTube compression algorithm, but it seems like it would’ve been easier to do it that way in the pre-digital era.
  • kodablah2 hours ago
    Also touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)
  • schoen2 hours ago
    With the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.
    • rafram2 hours ago
      You're not wrong, but part of the core problem with LLMs is that they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.
    • roughly9 minutes ago
      What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.

      Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.

    • jameshart2 hours ago
      Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.

      Almost a bit too on the nose.

      • cgorllaan hour ago
        A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
    • hcs2 hours ago
      I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
    • ProllyInfamousan hour ago
      Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
    • nphardon2 hours ago
      There's a lot of em dashes in the article as well, along with some phrasing that is very LLM. I think this was written with a mix of LLM and human.
      • lilbooan hour ago
        What is up with the LLM police in every comment section lately… even IF so.. isn’t that the authors whole point? It can be LLM assisted, but the beauty is in the human aspects of it. This piece is, at least in part written by a human… this is the future… so?
        • cgorllaan hour ago
          Every post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.
    • warmjets222an hour ago
      Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
    • EarlKing32 minutes ago
      Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
  • freetime2an hour ago
    As someone who isn't a type nerd, I think a more apt title would be "The Title Cards in Blade Runner are Thoughtfully Executed."
  • eszed20 minutes ago
    What's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
  • teo_zero44 minutes ago
    No, I don't find anything amazing in Blade Runner's title sequence, and the article does nothing to convince me.

    Yes, they got small-caps spacing right: hardly amazing. And what about the "feeling" the article talks about? Where is it and where does it come from?

    • roughlya few seconds ago
      Creating the title cards is a process that involves a thousand different decisions, all of which feed into each other. Design of this isn’t any different than design of software or design of anything else. The “feeling” comes from all of those decisions harmonizing together into a coherent whole, same way a well-crafted codebase feels correct.
    • Applejinx9 minutes ago
      It's probably an AI-written article. I was curious enough about the premise, but there wasn't any intention in there, it sort of wanders about going 'ooh'.
    • draw_down13 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • mpfh40 minutes ago
      I think Rands had too much coffee.
  • julienchastangan hour ago
    The complete opening sequence of Blade Runner is "fucking amazing". The entire movie is "fucking amazing". It is a beautiful, visually stunning masterpiece that I will never tire to look at complimented with a Vangelis soundtrack that ranks as one of the best in all of cinema. And a performance by Rutger Hauer that is pure artistic mastery. And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.
    • beej717 minutes ago
      Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.
    • jcims6 minutes ago
      >And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp?

      It really is for me a pinnacle. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to be part of something like this. Do you even know? I’m just some random fifty something among billions and your comment resonated because it was a shared experience. I have no idea if my grandchildren could watch the movie and come away with that but my cumulative nature and nurture sure as hell did.

  • lilbooan hour ago
    Wow interesting read — I like his point… LLMs can get us 90% of the way there but it’s the human touch that makes us memorable

    Haven’t read the alien article yet

  • 2 hours ago
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  • Computer02 hours ago
    I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
  • ljman hour ago
    I'm failing to understand what is so impressive.

    The credits at the start are off centre, biased to the right hand side.

    The prose that follows is fully centred, so it hangs to the left of the actor names, and it has a little bit of rich formatting. It's not even good prose because it is overloaded with emdashes, almost as if it's direction. People will say this is like AI but even AI has more restraint than this.

    So the fucking amazing title card for blade runner is a studio intern scrolling the first couple of pages of the screenplay through an overhead projector. Because it follows the exact format of a screenplay.

    But really it is the audio that is doing all the work. That is ominous and spooky and futuristic as hell.