The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/blade-runner-title-cards/Considering he recorded something like 35 albums, he was doing something right.
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!
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.
PSA: the si, as well as the pp, parameter is a form of tracking. If possible, consider trimming them after a copy-paste.
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.
As told through a Reddit post.
Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
What can ya do?
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).
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."
"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."
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.
Probably not true for most of the people reading a blog post about typography
I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
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.
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.
Fyi.
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.
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.
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>
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.
I’m glad there are people obsessed with fonts. 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.
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.
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.
Three variants; "Robot" is capitalized though it is not a proper noun.
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.
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.
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.
https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
And by the way, this website is fantastic.
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.
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?
It's like someone recommending a restaurant saying "tastes good", with no details to back up such assertion.
(As a full time developer for over a decade that got a design degree, I have experimented with it a lot!)
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.
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
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
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.
Haven’t read the alien article yet