The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
randsinrepose.com407 points by ExMachina73 a day ago
407 points by ExMachina73 a day 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 effectively immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.
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.
Vangelis is a bit funny and odd! Have a listen of Jon Anderson's (formerly of Yes) account of meeting and collaborating with Vangelis.
You might be surprised at how many famous professional musicians don't read music notation. Outside of the classical world, session work, and jazz fake-books, it's far from de rigueur.
This is true. I read an interview with Hans Zimmer who has scored dozens of Hollywood films (including Blade Runner 2049) and when he first arrived in London in the 1980s he couldn’t read music. Not sure about now.
ETA: he did eventually learn how to read music:
“I learnt to read music after I bought the Roland MC8 Microcomposer, because it then became essential for me. … I learnt music by ear and have picked up most of my technical knowledge through the sessions and gigs.”
https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/ronnys-electro-music-caba...
So, I looked up this piece of equipment that he references.
The Roland MC-8 MicroComposer by the Roland Corporation was introduced in early 1977 at a list price of US$4,795 (¥1,200,000 JPY) ... it was considered revolutionary at the time, introducing features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 kilobytes of random access memory which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8-16 step sequencers ... Roland switched to the then brand new Intel 8080A 8-bit microprocessor and increased the RAM from 512 bytes to 16KB, allowing storage of over 5,300 notes, which could be entered via the calculator keyboard (the preferred method) or recorded in real-time (not so easy). Backup was via cassette and could take 45 minutes to an hour for a three- or four-minute piece of music to back up and verify. The memory was volatile, so a loss of power meant complete loss of data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MC-8_Microcomposer
Only 200 were made, but it's possible he purchased it second-hand, as he had done for the Moog that was once owned by Tangerine Dream.
Insightful Hans Zimmer, 1982:
"You should be able to get something out of a machine that is better than an average musician."
I think he was even more `absolutely right` than he even thought
This is a great interview. This is the first time I have seen a younger Hans Zimmer.
Hans Zimmer's protegé Lorne Balfe is dyslexic and started off as a drummer. Balfe probably can't read music well although he's done well for himself.
It's one of those "lies programmers believe" kind of things - we like to think that there is one definitive "notation" of a piece of music - but even when there IS accurate sheet music, it only tells part of the story.
Music before recordings was much closer to jam-band style than people realize; and in the Middle Ages you could hear substantial differences in the same song just by traveling a few tens of miles.
When I was in high school band, there was a music store where I would go purchase my saxophone reeds. And as it was the 1980s, most of the music store floor space held racks of sheet music in books and quartos and so forth.
Now, I had learned music theory and sheet music, which immediately disqualified me from a career in punk rock. But the music store sold modern pop music as well. It wasn't long before I had Tina Turner, Billy Idol, and Depeche Mode songbooks.
The Billy Idol songbook was especially interesting, as it included guitar tabulature. The text explained how Billy's guitarist, Steve Stevens, used novel techniques to achieve his sound.
Now I did not play guitar, so the tabulature was merely a visual curiosity for me, but me and my sister had some Casio keyboards from Toys-R-Us, in addition to my saxophones. So I would try and play the tunes I knew best from the songbooks.
But it was really weird, because when I played the melodies according to the sheet music, it didn't sound (musically) like the band on the radio. In fact, there was a Howard Jones song that would jar me into a Christmas spirit, because of a certain run of notes in a particular key. But sometimes the rhythms were approximated, or the notes were off.
I lost interest in purchasing these song books. I think it eventually became clear that the artists were not composing pop songs by writing sheet music, but someone with a degree, taking a break from their McDonald's job, was listening to the songs and transcribing them to conventional sheet music.
Many years later, I joined a large secular chorus of mixed voices. The sheet music we received included Rogers & Hammerstein, and John Rutter arrangements. That sheet music was exactly the remedy to restore my faith again, and my high school studies were finally vindicated for a life of non-profit volunteer service!
This is definitely a thing. I remember buying the Metallica black album tab book and there was one section in there with a chord that was literally impossible to play as written. I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was a two note chord on adjacent strings with an impossible to cover distance between them.
On the flip side, a lot of amazing pop artists had incredible musicality as well as the ability to write scores. Mel Torme, for example.
Not knowing the alphabet of music lets the mind make its own more efficient abstractions.
Just like not knowing how to read and write does to your ability to speech.
It does affect your ability to speak, and not necessarily only negatively.
You lose more evolved vocabulary and formal grammatical structures, but you gain a liveliness and a colloquial dexterity that bookish people often lack.
You can also be more inventive in your metaphors and figures of speech, instead of relying on the usual stock cliches - something often seen in oral interviews with illiterate folk.
I appreciate the tongue in cheek joke, but it is quite different.
In the case of music, you virtually always only hear the music, and the written down form is just a formalisation of said music.
In the case of language, a vast corpus of information (the majority of it) is available only in written form, with only recent proliferation of recorded audiobooks.
Additionally written text is a separate form of language with its own beauty and particularity, while in the case of music notation it is just an imperfect way of making notes of music. So many of the parts and details which make music beautiful are absent from the vast majority of partitures.
Especially when you can easily do things while playing that require tons of work to notate; like sliding key changes, etc.
I have never been able to follow a score despite music lessons and playing in an orchestra (I faked it).
I find such a striking difference between notation that just swims in front of my eyes:
https://musescore.com/user/14835636/scores/6186772
And a bar graph which I can hear when muted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o
I have a similar issue with algebraic notation, the signifier and signified never connects. So much misery spending hours with a mass of punctuated greek in a cs paper to discover it describes a triangle. The decryption is not even sticky, I look away for a second and it immediately re-encrypts back to soup.
I don't understand why since programming languages having always felt natural and something I learned as a pre-teen just by being left alone with a BBC micro and a "type in a game" book.
Even a lot of session work. Tony Levin (bass player best known for his work with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, but who’s also played with Chuck and Gap Mangione, Paul Simon, Dire Straits, Yes, … well, more than I could reasonably put here). commented in his book Beyond the Bass Clef, that he went years doing session work without having to read music. Most rock/pop/jazz music is largely improvisatory in its structure. It’s really only when you get to larger groups (say more than about 7 or 8) that some sort of notation becomes essential to keep everyone together and even then, the rhythm section (guitar/bass/drums/keys) may not be working from anything more precise than a set of chord changes.
Improvisation goes back as far as music and even some classical music has improvised elements (cadenzas were traditionally improvised before they became commonly notated, Baroque music scored for continuo essentially provides a bassline and chord changes, albeit the chords given in an archaic form (figured bass) that is not widely known by contemporary musicians.
The most amazing improvisers, it turns out, are professional church organists (think the ones who work for the largest churches/cathedrals, not the grandmas playing a church warbler at the corner parish, but sometimes them too). When I auditioned for the Holy Name Cathedral Choir, I wanted to sing a piece by Massenet, but I had lost my original sheet music halfway through trying to transcribe a cleaner copy so I had a melody line and only a few parts of the piano accompaniment. The (assistant!) organist who accompanied me at my audition site-improvised an accompaniment for the piece that was, in my opinion, actually better than the written accompaniment I had lost.
That said, being able to read music can be a sort of superpower. So many times on church gigs, I’ve had guitar players be astonished by my ability to pull chord changes out of piano/organ parts without notated chords. Certainly, some aspects of music are hard to convey in notation. Swung rhythm is a particularly notable case where you’re playing something halfway between a triplet rhythm of ♩♪ and a dotted rhythm (insufficient Unicode to write a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth). The early transmission of jazz music to European composers by way of sheet music led to them missing out on the rhythmic aspects but picking up some of the harmonic novelties. A common injunction to musicians is to play the music, not the notes.
Dave Grohl is another one that comes to mind.
Also Kurt Cobain, as noted by Rick Beato:
"It doesn't matter if people know what they are doing, if they can just do it intuitively"
John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, of Sex Pistols (amongst others) often said his Punk movement was as much a protest against the Prog Rock musical elite as it was a movement against other norms. He would say that you didn’t even need to learn to play an instrument to be able to make music with it.
I wonder if nowadays we get more people reading notation (are there apps to help you learn?) or less (more people composing in garageband type apps)
I still love the parody of contemporaries Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and Moroder in the Adult Swim "Infomercial" called "Live from the Necropolis: Lords of Synth": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
I rarely read about the contribution a good music score has to a movie's popularity. A great score makes the movie. For example,
The Blue Max, Ben Hur, the first Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dr Zhivago, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and, of course, Blade Runner!
The original teaser for Star Wars was made before they had John Williams' score:
https://youtu.be/XHk5kCIiGoM?si=VxAJcCATzwn6gZPw
Watching it may help you appreciate just how important the Williams' score was to Star Wars' success. It's one of the all-time greats!
I'd also add that some movies are worth watching purely because of their score. e.g. "Conan the Barbarian" is a pretty shlocky flick. However, the director and composer took a collaborative approach to the score that was closer to opera than film. Unlike most movies, work on the score began before filming and there was continual collaboration during filming. The result remains one of the best scores in the history of film, and a film that makes the music its backbone.
> si=VxAJcCATzwn6gZPw
PSA: the si, as well as the pp, parameter is a form of tracking. If possible, consider trimming them after a copy-paste.
I went with my dorm to see SW on the second day of release. I had no idea what to expect.
Then, with the opening stab of music, I knew it was going to be great.
I guess the good examples where music could be an important driver to the movies popularity (or revival of popularity) might be: "Requiem for a dream" and "Das Boot". Also for me personally - "The Mission" as incredible score by Ennio Morricone has brought me tia film I'd rather ignore. Other (also personal) example is " The Spawn" with it's mind-blowing OST.
I always remember a quote I read when I was way younger about Halloween or The Exorcist : "the film's score is a character in its own right".
P.S. I deliberately did not include musicals or movies like 2001 that did not compose an original score.
2001 did have an original score, but it was thrown out and replaced with classical music
I'll add Donnie Darko and The Blues Brothers (that may be cheating, though).
Donnie Darko is interesting because the director's cut has significant changes to the music compared to the theatrical release, including the one played in the opening sequence.
I didn't know that and Donnie Darko is one of my favourite films.
From Wikipedia: "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen was replaced with "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS, which Kelly had not had the rights to use in the film's theatrical release.
Also: Kelly had originally wanted to use the songs "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS and "West End Girls" by the Pet Shop Boys during the opening scene of Donnie cycling home and Sparkle Motion's dance at the talent show respectively, but financial constraints meant that he instead had to use "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen and "Notorious" by Duran Duran. For the director's cut, Kelly was able to gain the rights to use "Never Tear Us Apart" for the opening scene, and moved "The Killing Moon" to later in the film; "Notorious" was not moved from the talent show scene.
Donnie Darko is (to me) one of those movies ruined by the director's cut. Not only due to the music changes, but also because the "message" of the movie is made more explicit and on the nose. And reading Kelly's interviews and opinions is even worse. One of those movies where keeping the original, and the mystery, is absolutely mandatory.
The Blues Brothers IS the soundtrack. Nobody remembers Twiggy was in it.
I remember her due to her accent (I'm english too). Next you'll be telling me that nobody remembers Frank Oz in it. Or Mr. T.
I was never a big 1980's synth music guy, but for some reason I always enjoyed the soundtracks Vangelis made. Not only for this movie, but also "Chariots of Fire", "Antarctica", &c.
I've always wondered what was causing the explosions. I've seen the movie dozens of times, and if they explained it, I missed it.
As good as that track is its literally his only good stuff. Try as I might, and as eager as I was to like him his library of music just falls flat.
As we say in another language, "you should probably get your ears cleaned".
Besides the Blade Runner & Chariots of Fire soundtracks (two masterpieces of albums, which is two more than 90% of the world), his repertoire is filled with instant electronic classics, such as Earth, Albedo 0.39, Spiral, and l'Apocalypse des Animaux.
I'm not even mentioning Aphrodite's Child.
The albums he did with Jon Anderson are worth a listen too I think.
His entire discography is worth a listen, honestly. Gems absolutely everywhere, and deep knowledge of his (traveling!) studio.
For me first experience of Aphrodite's Child was even better for I knew of Demis Roussos only by his later work
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.
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.
Also the problem with LinkedIn, local news etc. Contemporary American culture is addicted to dramatic writing and tries to leverage its tropes to create emotional engagement on everything.
Exactly. That's not just a load-bearing truth — it's a testament to the power of the contemporary zeitgeist!
> they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.
As told through a Reddit post.
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.
It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
What can ya do?
>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.
I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
As a note on this, I just reread Neuromancer, and the bulk majority of it takes place in places that are not “high tech/low life” locales. People remember Chiba City, but that’s chapter one, there’s a whole rest of the book after that.
Very likely.
However, I see two problems with this: one, I think people are going to make comparisons to Matrix rather than Blade Runner, and judging from the trailer it looks a lot like a modern Matrix (understandably!). Second, Neuromancer starts with "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" so the grey/"not sunny" look is kinda baked in and hard to avoid ;)
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
Casablanca is a famous example of this too.
And LOTR, though in that case coming to it after reading Terry Pratchett was difficult for me (Pratchett didn't just copy its, or other, fantasy tropes, but send them up in an exceedingly clever way).
Yeah, there’s a bunch of these. I really like finding these sorts of “ur-“ moments, the first time a way of doing things really crystallizes into something other practitioners can see. The Matrix is another one - that movie is the transition point from 90s cinema to the 2000s, and it’s a little clunky from a 2000s viewpoint, but if you look at everything that came before it, it’s so clearly a turning point.
Stop trying to steal The Matrix. It was released in 1999, that's OUR movie. You get the sequels.
I have escaped the Matrix [bits and bytes world]; But entered the Gastrics (juice) [ie flesh and bones world]
I'd say if there even was a bump between 90s and 2000s it was not the matrix, it was Guy Ritchie. And then Gaspar Noe sealed that. Tarantino was having a smoke nearby.
Having read LOTR many, many times before I ever started trying to read Pratchett, I can't read Pratchett. That's not a slam at Sir Terry; I'd just internalized Tolkien so much that it was beyond my ability to properly appreciate him.
If you haven't tried it, Small Gods is frequently recommended as a standalone, and it's very far in subject matter from the early tolkien-parody rincewind/guards books.
Many Pratchett books aren't riffs on Tolkien at all. Someone recommended Small Gods (excellent choice, and not a whiff of Elves or Dwarves there) but many other Pratchett books are genuinely good and not cheap shots at Tolkien.
I say give it another try.
Tolkien, Pratchett … like Bach and Toploader?
I'd say like Bach and Rossini. Rossini was perfectly aware of the form of traditional opera, but deliberately chose to engage with it in a much less reverent style.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.
I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.
I heard the story as attributed to Asimov: he was walking out of Hamlet when a fellow patron said, "I don't see what the big deal is. It was all just cliches strung together."
It’s a bit like how the end point of the most wildly successful music is that you hear it on a loop in the grocery store
Same thing happened to Tolkien and fantasy literature.
Will just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance.
The other was in Terminator 2 with how agreeable LLM's will be regarding new information.
Terminator/T-800 tests his foster mother's identity with a phone call.
Terminator impersonating John - "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie?" (using a fake name instead of the dog's real name, Max).
T-1000 "Wolfie's fine," the Terminator hangs up and tells John "Your foster parents are dead."
If T-1000 was an LLM:
"What's wrong with Wolfie?"
"Wolfie's fine."
"Actually his name's Max."
"You're absolutely right. It's not Wolfie -- it's Max."
"Actually we don't have a dog."
"I apologize. I shouldn't have assumed you have a dog. I will be more careful in the future. Do you want me to list common pets in American households?"
Terminator hangs up and tells John "You need a better model."
Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
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.
A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
Describe in single words, without making a bulleted list starting with emoji, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Oh noes, all the poor people who taught themselves how to speak English from books and movies, not the street or school.
Third category, behind a crafty LLMs.
Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.
You tell an AI it’s an AI. It looks in its training set for examples and finds Blade Runner (and scifi books).
Maybe that’s the origin of its use of em dashes.
It “feels” that’s what an AI should use, it is told it is an AI, therefore it should use them, thus does.
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.
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?
> Chances are, you never think about typography.
Probably not true for most of the people reading a blog post about typography
Also touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)
I Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.
Came here to say the same thing.
I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
This is interesting for me as the author mentions in the opening line that he basically is a slave to the machine theirself and the only freedom they got is in choosing the font space of their user interface.
And then they go on about the intricate details of some artistic choice 40 years ago. How the human touch and deliberate decisions were made..it all eclipsing in it being about a movie where the machine rebelled.
> I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.
Tangential but I've been enjoying GNU Unifont for this purpose. I like the look of it and it does a good job supporting a huge range of characters. Terminals warn me that it's not technically monospace, but for all intents and purposes in a terminal windows it is. I have it as the default bundled font with a project that renders custom glyphs on the fly for display on real VT320 hardware as DRCS.
> Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road.
Fun fact: the reason all car commercials sound the same, and distinctly different from other types, is that people tend to pay attention to them, but only when they're in the market for a car.
--source: ex worked as copywriter for ad agency
The skyline was inspired by north east England, Middlesbrough Teesside. ICI was one of the largest chemical sites in the world. Ridley Scott had studied at Teesside Polytechnic and took inspiration from the Imperial Chemical Industries that over looked Middlesbrough. One side of the skyline in the area you see towers and smoke billows and roaring flames, the other picturesque north Yorkshire moors and Odins Mount. Quite a contrast.
Small Caps were a thing when I was a typography fan. They aren't just smaller versions of caps, they were specifically designed for in-text use as opposed to display use.
Fyi.
Yeah, I was gonna say that. The proportions are pretty different. Though I rarely use them inline… I’ve used them in a few logos when the uniformity of the letterforms just clicked in-context.
Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.
Normal caps are for in-text use too. A really good typeface will have different versions for all kinds of different display conditions. Sometimes several levels of display for headings and above, like posters and signs. There will also be different weights which are important, for example if you are setting light on dark as opposed to dark on light (e.g. on UK road signs a medium font is used for light on dark and heavy for dark on light). It's all about giving the desired optical effect.
In computer science literature it's common to typeset the names of problems in caps (e.g. 3-SAT), but I find doing it with normal caps so ugly. It's much more pleasing to use small caps, and some works do (including my own PhD thesis). What I find even nicer is that you can still capitalise proper nouns and the beginning of sentences when using small caps.
I was enjoying this article, but several of the images don't seem to load on any device I try, so it's hard to keep following along with what the author is discussing.
It kinda makes me want to mess around with special fonts on my blog, but designing a simple way to change fonts and font options on a per-post basis sounds difficult.
I love typefaces where the italics look very different from the non-italicized font. The combination of that and the brownish red color used for the word "Replicant" does such a great job of leaping out and cutting through.
Incidentally, I just went through a "what font should I use in my terminal" journey for the first time in a long time recently and took a long wandering trip back home to Source Code Pro. There's something about how round and open the letters are that's very readable to me. Compared to a more typewritery tech-y fixed width typeface, it just parses really easily to my eyes.
Blade Runner is absolute perfection in every aspect. It’s crazy how deep Ridley Scott has fallen since
I still enjoy some of his later works. James Cameron on the other hand - boggles my mind that he wants to waste his remaining years on that Avatar dreck.
lights Molotov Yes, but which cut?
Ok, I'll bite!
I agree the theatrical cut is inferior, the voice over wasn't done willingly by Harrison Ford, the "happy ending" is forced and hideous, etc... but I kind like the hardboiled vibes of the narration. It was also the first version I watched so it has a special place in my heart.
The Director's Cut -- that I know isn't an actual director's cut -- is possibly my favorite. Sadly, some murky visuals and a couple of plot holes (mostly number of replicants), plus the Zhora stunt double... once you see her, you cannot unsee her, and you'll wonder how you ever failed to notice the stunt double looks nothing like Joanna Cassidy and even the wig is wrong. But this is the version that stuck with me, and the one with the best color grading.
Then there's a workprint with increased violence. I don't get why some fans prefer an extended scene of Roy Batty gouging Tyrell's eyes out... I don't think "more is better" applies to graphic violence; sometimes implied violence is better, and in any case showing this doesn't improve the character of Roy.
Finally... the Final Cut. I appreciate they fixed (most) plot holes, they FIXED ZHORA'S STUNT DOUBLE (the single best improvement) and the image quality is way, way better. However, I cannot forgive Ridley Scott for changing the color grading to a greenish tint; Blade Runner now looks closer to the Matrix, which is UNWELCOME. I liked the more bluish/brownish tint of the Director's Cut, and really dislike the greenish/orange-y nonsense of the Special Edition. Here you can see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx-Ch3Pzg8).
My ideal edition of Blade Runner: the color grading of the Director's Cut, with the improved image quality and fixed plot holes (and Zhora's stunt double) from the Final Cut.
(And yes, I'm aware I haven't mentioned all the cuts, just the ones I know).
> Here are the six that have made my cut [...] The question is: how do they make you feel?
Feel, schmeel, I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away for the very practical offense of making 0 resemble O. Even in my pre-coding youth, I already had an inordinate fondness for the disambiguations of OCR-A [0]...
> HARRISON FORD
Hold up... Why is that one twisted!? Is it an optical illusion? Am I going nuts?
Nope. I opened it up in GIMP and I'm not (that type of) crazy: The H is ~4 pixels higher than the D, as if the whole thing was rotated by 1° clockwise. However the same rotation isn't present on the which appear cards immediately before and after.
I assume this is subtle quirk introduced the video-editing process, but if it happened today (instead of back in 1982) I could entertain the idea that it's One Weird Trick intended to attract viewer attention via subtle wrongness.
> we obsess over the details.
"I'm doing my part!" <Starship-Troopers salute>
> I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away
this is bait. berkeley mono out of the box sure doesn't do O0 separation but their "compiler"[0] lets you get a dashed one _very_ easily.
[0] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono#:~:text=Custom...
I mean back in the day, those kinds of titles involved film editing, not video editing. As in, physically filming title cards with a camera (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements). It's easy to see how things could get slightly misaligned.
Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It's the kind of thing that stands out very noticeably in an image on a web page, when there are lots of perfectly horizontal edges to compare it against (e.g. the edge of the viewport). But I think it would be much harder to notice if projected onto a movie screen in a dark theater.
In older films and lower budget films into the 90s, you could expect the titles to wobble up and down and left and right from frame to frame, too.
They are! I actually watch this movie pretty often just to understand why the interfaces and the fonts integrate so well into the overall plot and visual flow. So glad to see two of my favorite fonts in your list, namely IBM Plex Mono and Berkeley Mono. But you should have a look at their newest TX-02, you will be pleasantly surprised. Do share your ghostty setup! Did you manage yet to render your terminal data through the Denabase interface?
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."
Why?
Probably because non-type-nerds would not be amazed. They also wouldn’t switch between six different monospace fonts, or talk at length about how fonts generate feelings.
I’m glad there are people obsessed with fonts. But writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting.
> But writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting.
I don't follow this one little bit. I frequently read stuff about interests that I don't share (this is a good way to find new interests, btw), and I much prefer when the people who are excited by something express that excitement. I wouldn't even click on a link titled "X is Well Executed" because it sounds like a dry document written by a disinterested engineer analyzing something they don't care about. "X is Amazing" is going to be written by someone who actually gives a shit about X, and therefore is much more likely to be interesting.
Enthusiasm is a good thing and not to be avoided. Clinical language is a turn-off, only to be used when clarity is more important than anything else.
It's not writing for people exactly like you to express enthusiasm and interest in something niche. That's good writing for people not like you.
>writing for people exactly like yourself is often limiting
Who am I supposed to write for?
I flagged this because it was written by an LLM.
Always been fascinated by the craft of film titles. Powerpoints could be so more engaging with less words and more music.
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.
While what you’re seeing is almost certainly a compression artifact or digitization difficulty (keep in mind, theater screens were the target media,) it was almost certainly a product of phototypesetting, so it would have to be inverted at least once. In phototypesetting, you’d load a large dark negative with a typeface developed into it into a phototypesetting machine. A typesetter would enter the text and whatnot into the machine, and the machine would locate the appropriate letter on the film using some kind of timing mark (the machines were all different) and as the letter passed over the target area, it would shoot light from xenon bulb through it to develop that letter, in the correct place, onto the target film. This is how a lot (most?) typesetting was done in the decades before digitized fonts were a thing. That’s how they got such nice clean lettering on posters and things like that.
I don’t know for sure, but they probably shot a negative of the completed type with a red gel behind it to get the final frames.
IIRC early copies of BladeRunner in the digital era, like the original DVDs of this, really suffered from the lack of detail on red, specifically, from the 4:2:0 color space encoding ( https://spearsandmunsil.com/portfolio-item/choosing-a-color-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.
Oooh that’s interesting - I’d been aware of the color space encoding, but hadn’t fully grokked how it manifested.
It’s interesting because it straddles analog & digital so many times - film is a chemical process, broadcast is an analog process, CRT screens are analog processes, and at the end of the whole thing, our eyes are an analog process, so you’ve got this wonderful bundle of path dependency (B&W -> Color, Analog -> digital, film -> broadcast -> DVD) where you’re trying to capture the characteristics of a dozen different physical phenomenon so you can throw a photon into someone’s eye Just Right repeatably.
> For the exposition crawl, they use standard capitalization except for two variants
Three variants; "Robot" is capitalized though it is not a proper noun.
Everything in Blade Runner is amazing.
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.
>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.
> Do you even know?
I've wondered about this too. Did Ridley Scott and crew set out to make the greatest movie ever (IMO)? Or did something magical happen? My guess is "auteurs" often set out to create a masterwork but usually something beyond their control derails that. But, if they are lucky, they stumble upon something extraordinary that touches the heart of the human experience and that only happens once in a lifetime, if even that.
Everything must be aligned, and during the thing you are not sure everything else is going to be aligned.
As an example on the other side of the spectrum, there may be plenty of bad and forgettable movies with incredible and unforgettable performances from a very small part of it (the sound recording or design, one of the actors, a single superb scene, one of the scenerys) while the rest is mediocre to bad.
Rachael smoking in that scene is almost like a painting, a masterpiece.
I love the whole movie and soundtrack with the same enthusiasm as you, it's one of my favorites, but that scene with Rachael is something else.
I agree. I think some creations are absolutely rare, unique and unlikely artefacts of culture and circumstances. Technology, people, means, vision and all sorts of other aspects had to collide and conspire to bear fruit to these marvels. Especially for big team projects such as movies. Another examples that come to my mind are computer games StarCraft: Brood War and Bioshock: Infinite. Complex visionary collaborative projects resulting in absolute perfection. Wow, just wow. Humanity truly can be amazing if it gets its shit together
Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.
Good luck even finding the non-directors cut.
I liked the film noir voice-over.
There is a very good blu-ray set, now out of print but not crazy expensive, that has five different cuts: US theatrical, international theatrical, workprint, directors and final cut (which is the actual director's cut). That's the best version of the theatrical release that you'll probably ever be able to get.
Only the final cut is available on UHD or an in-print blu-ray (and I would guess streaming as well).
> I liked the film noir voice-over.
I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.
This seems like a lot of verbiage to say 'I found a video of an early version of the Blade Runner opening titles and they're surprisingly ass,' an observation I heartily agree with.
Some of the things he's gushing over have a very prosaic explanation, eg the capitalization of NEXUS and TYRELL CORPORATION. Whenever a named entity (human or prop) makes its first appearance in a movie script, it's capitalized to indicate that it's a story element that will require continuity, the art department, and a budget of some kind. This convention is so intuitive to even the casual reader that I'm surprised it's not employed more often. I agree with the other person who observed that the ark red of Replicants is an unfortunate artefact of the optical transfer process, but it does do a good job setting the viewer up to be scared right from the outset.
I've always assumed the title cards were one of Ridley Scott's concessions to the studio that loved the movie but were terrified about how to sell it to the public, like the eoriginal gumshoe voice-over that explained a lot of the story in the style of an old detective novel.
Berkeley Mono is an excellent font. Highly recommended if you still code.
https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
And by the way, this website is fantastic.
https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono - Is a free, open-source alternative.
I paid for berkeley mono and don't mind. But I'm not saying anything negative about free alts
What do you mean, if you still code? I assume everyone on HN still at the very least review actual code in an IDE or editor.
These days, I see a lot of people using AI for everything except hobby projects. Recently, I joined a maintenance project where the team leader even instructed us to use AI exclusively. So I just keep one hobby project that I write by hand, but the market these days mostly uses AI coding.
Completely trusting it to the AI is negligent, I don't think any serious projects do it this way. A lot of AI usage yes, but reviews and tweaks still require someone reading and understanding code, structures and design patterns.
Well there's a difference between "Generate all code with AI" and "Trust AI exclusively"
And yes, in talking to friends in other areas of s/w, it's really eating the workflow.
It does degrade muscle memory, too. I sat down and tried to write some code yesterday and found I fumbled the basic syntax over and over.
Personal feelings aside, I do think there's a degredation of ability that will cause AI lock-in. Eventually we wont be able to whip up analysis or prototypes without AI.
It's not like mechanical engineers can do a big part of their day job without things like SolidWorks, but still, it feels like an Uber moment where they're burning hard to displace traditional methods before they price gouge.
I'd love a better IDE, where I'm _writing_ rather than _watching_ and it truly does fill in gaps / help vs handing over the reins entirely.
I think so too, but the problem is that this was a 'serious' project. Some tech leaders genuinely believe that AI writes better code than humans, and the sad part is that they're somewhat right.
So these days, I'm not sure anymore. I just do coding as a hobby now. I once asked out of curiosity, and I still remember the answer:
'Why do I trust AI more than you? Because you code based on your own thinking, and that doesn't always match mine. But if I run AI against the spec I wrote, at least when I take responsibility, I won't feel like I got screwed over.'
The project had no issues. Of course it didn't—most CRUD work already has well-established solutions
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?
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.
Yes, no doubts. But why does the author think that in this case such process was followed, and was so successful to deserve the "amazing" adjective? How did this specific design manage to convey the intended feeling? Was it better than the proto version that was never released?
It's like someone recommending a restaurant saying "tastes good", with no details to back up such assertion.
The evidence is the output - sure, they could’ve been throwing dice for every decision and landed at this spot out of pure luck, but that’s not a hypothesis that’s likely to hold up under scrutiny.
Here's a visual listicle of "the 10 best opening title sequences of all time". (Epilepsy warning: a lot of flashing in #10) - they compare and contrast and highlight how their picks stand out against others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8twthdaqB8
Not only is this a better example of film (title) criticism, the titles they pick are also more amazing.
“This is a better example of film criticism” is a defensible statement, “more amazing” is an aesthetic opinion.
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'.
I also appreciate this was before the trend of animating the opening credits by increasing the kerning. I'm sure graphic designers today would consider it boring and low effort/energy. It's giving lame. Or some such criticism.
same thing happened on the web, letter-spacing/tracking reveal on scroll is basically the default hero animation now. felt premium a few years back, now it just kinda signals template
Did the author forget to add pictures? They seem to be referred to in the text.
The images don't load without javascript, which sadly is customary for the modern web experience.
Which pictures are you missing? I see three stills from the Bladerunner intro sequence, and two embedded videos of it.
My favourite title cards are in "Thank You for Smoking". They're all done like old fashioned cigarette packs.
This makes me think - should we be using non-monospace fonts for coding agent chat to improve readability? Wonder if we can get Claude and Codex to do that automatically in supported terminals
I've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code
Nope. It might improve readability for individual words, but for blocks of code with similar features at irregular lengths, uniform kerning provides structure and a bunch of clean edges that help you visually orient yourself. Just like title text and body text generally need different kerning, so do body text and code.
(As a full time developer for over a decade that got a design degree, I have experimented with it a lot!)
What's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
Title as submitted to HN is missing a word.
Interesting. While the missing word doesn’t contribute any new information, it does convey a feeling. Like a typeface.
While yes, the opening and title cards are very good, I can't get over the (imho) pretty "meh" layout of the crawling text. The right margin is very jagged (especially the "Replicant"), even when it doesn't appear to be necessary (notice that in "Replicants were used Off-world as\n slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and\n colonization of other planets.", the "slave" could've fit into the first line and "colonization" could've been hyphenated). If necessary, they also could've changed some of the wording for better typography. Also, the last two sentences weirdly seem to have different left margins.
Hyphenation isn’t the best for readability, which is especially important with moving text. (That’s also why there was so much leading, so it would be easy to see which line continued the one you’re looking at.) Many of the word combinations that were kept together rather than split up had much more impact together. Reading that the replicants were slave labor has more literary impact than them being slave
labor. Avoiding left-edge raggedness is critical for readability, but avoiding right-edge raggedness is only more important than disturbing meaning and readability when either a) the block of text needs to have strong visual integrity in the context of other elements (even column gutters or page edges in some cases,) or b) when space is critical. In this case they made the right decision. The left margins in the final text block were for emphasis. Even in a business letter wouldn’t be out-of-bounds, but in creative writing it’s der rigueur, and in on-screen movie text, things like that are nearly required.
I think the placement of Replicant is deliberate. It's heading out of bounds and makes you uneasy when you see it.
It is quite mediocre. Nothing "fucking amazing" about the title cards. In the world of movie title cards, this one sits in the bottom half.
Midway through, the article stops being about Blade runner and becomes "people building things with AI are creating garbage", and Blade runner title cards is now a prop that substantiates that opinion.
It's fine if the typographic analysis holds up. It does not. I'm not able to see what OP is seeing. What am I missing?
>In the world of movie title cards, this one sits in the bottom half.
Really? Are we including B movies, porn, educational films (other than porn) in this massive list?
IBM Plex Mono totally slaps. Look at those braces!
Actual title is "The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing" - and I'm pretty sure the hn submission said that yesterday. I prefer the original, and I don't understand the reason for bowdlerising it.
Enter the Void. Not that's an amazing title sequence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
I feel like I should have my eyelids taped open strapped into a chair in a very dark room with this being projected on a screen with a loud sound system as part of the resting period between waterboarding sessions because I refuse to telling my inquisitors the answers they are asking.
It's a classic malicious compliance. "We're obligated to put these credits on the screen" even though it's impossible to read all of it without stopping.
I think I was too sober to really enjoy it though
>I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. Maybe this person and I could become friends.
I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
Paging John Gruber!
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.
The em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.
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