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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

#81

Post by excalibur »

roughly wrote: post #54
majormajor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#82

Post by toast0 »

teraflop wrote: post #69
Terr_ wrote: post #60

> 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…

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 lot…

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#84

Post by bombcar »

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 .

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#85

Post by krapp »

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).

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#86

Post by chrisweekly »

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.

Same thing happened to Tolkien and fantasy literature.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#88

Post by jacquesm »

emmelaich wrote: post #64
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.

Vangelis is a bit funny and odd! Have a listen of Jon Anderson's (formerly of Yes) account of meeting and collaborating with Vangelis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItV5h3Arl5M

Priceless video, thank you so much.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#89

Post by jacquesm »

psyclobe wrote: post #55
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.

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