alt Hacker NewsThe title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Comments
Also touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)
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.
> 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!" <Starship-Troopers salute>
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.
>I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. Maybe this person and I could become friends.
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.
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."
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.
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 she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.
I also appreciate this was before the trend of animating the opening credits by increasing the kerning. I'm sure graphic designers today would consider it boring and low effort/energy. It's giving lame. Or some such criticism.
This makes me think - should we be using non-monospace fonts for coding agent chat to improve readability? Wonder if we can get Claude and Codex to do that automatically in supported terminals
Title as submitted to HN is missing a word.
What's this unavoidable YouTube video that activates on-scroll? I that doesn't become a design pattern, because it's horrible.
IBM Plex Mono totally slaps. Look at those braces!
Enter the Void. Not that's an amazing title sequence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/61211/enter-the-void-title-seque...
Wow interesting read — I like his point… LLMs can get us 90% of the way there but it’s the human touch that makes us memorable
Haven’t read the alien article yet
I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.
Paging John Gruber!
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 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.
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?
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.
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.