Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

randsinrepose.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 221 posts

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#51

Post by ilamont »

rdiddly wrote: post #47
ColdStream wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#52

Post by roughly »

majormajor wrote: post #38
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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#53

Post by bhasi »

mannyv wrote: post #41

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.

Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#54

Post by roughly »

majormajor wrote: post #40
roughly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#55

Post by psyclobe »

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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#56

Post by DrewADesign »

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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#57

Post by nullc »

beej71 wrote: post #30
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…

Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.

Good luck even finding the non-directors cut.

I liked the film noir voice-over.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#58

Post by danielvf »

ljm wrote: post #18

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 em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#59

Post by dwd »

larrywright wrote: post #50
rdiddly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1ZnWc-sFd0

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#60

Post by Terr_ »

> 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!"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A

Post reply on HN