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The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

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Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#31

Post by jcims »

julienchastang wrote: post #19

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…

>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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#32

Post by roughly »

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#33

Post by ColdStream »

ilamont wrote: post #26

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#34

Post by roughly »

teo_zero wrote: post #21

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#35

Post by ColdStream »

schoen wrote: post #2

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.

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."

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#36

Post by anigbrowl »

rafram wrote: post #5
schoen wrote: post #2

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#37

Post by shermantanktop »

lilboo wrote: post #17
freetime2 wrote: post #12

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#38

Post by majormajor »

roughly wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#39

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#40

Post by majormajor »

roughly wrote: post #28
schoen wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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).

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