The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

(randsinrepose.com)

79 points | by ExMachina73 1 hour ago

9 comments

  • teo_zero 1 minute ago
    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?

  • kodablah 1 hour ago
  • julienchastang 4 minutes ago
    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.
  • schoen 1 hour ago
    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.
    • rafram 1 hour ago
      You're not wrong, but part of the core problem with LLMs is that they write every blog post and README like they're writing the opening titles for Blade Runner.
    • jameshart 55 minutes ago
      Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.

      Almost a bit too on the nose.

      • cgorlla 20 minutes ago
        A typographic Voight-Kampff test is pretty awesome.
    • hcs 1 hour ago
      I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.
    • warmjets222 35 minutes ago
      Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.
    • ProllyInfamous 46 minutes ago
      Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
    • nphardon 1 hour ago
      There's a lot of em dashes in the article as well, along with some phrasing that is very LLM. I think this was written with a mix of LLM and human.
      • lilboo 13 minutes ago
        What is up with the LLM police in every comment section lately… even IF so.. isn’t that the authors whole point? It can be LLM assisted, but the beauty is in the human aspects of it. This piece is, at least in part written by a human… this is the future… so?
        • cgorlla 4 minutes ago
          Every post is actually scanned for LLM content as well.
  • freetime2 37 minutes ago
    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."
  • ljm 11 minutes ago
    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.

  • lilboo 24 minutes ago
    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

  • Computer0 50 minutes ago
    I found this site [https://fontsinuse.com/] mentioned in the article to be quite interesting to browse through.