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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

#101

Post by brador »

bombcar wrote: post #84
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 .

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.

Not knowing the alphabet of music lets the mind make its own more efficient abstractions.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#102

Post by roughly »

teo_zero wrote: post #97
roughly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#103

Post by burnoutdv »

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#104

Post by brador »

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 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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#105

Post by jimmaswell »

> 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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#106

Post by sgt »

jvanderbot wrote: post #83

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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#108

Post by polotics »

ilamont wrote: post #51
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 .

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…

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

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#109

Post by jdw64 »

sgt wrote: post #106
jvanderbot wrote: post #83

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.

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.

Re: The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

#110

Post by sgt »

jdw64 wrote: post #109
sgt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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