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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.

I rarely read about the contribution a good music score has to a movie's popularity. A great score makes the movie. For example,

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!

I was never a big 1980's synth music guy, but for some reason I always enjoyed the soundtracks Vangelis made. Not only for this movie, but also "Chariots of Fire", "Antarctica", &c.

I've always wondered what was causing the explosions. I've seen the movie dozens of times, and if they explained it, I missed it.

That soundtrack is absolutely perfect.

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.

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.

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.

Will just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance.

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."

Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.

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.

Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.

I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.

Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.

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.

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.

I Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.

Came here to say the same thing.

I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/

Yeah, I was gonna say that. The proportions are pretty different. Though I rarely use them inline… I’ve used them in a few logos when the uniformity of the letterforms just clicked in-context.

Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.

Normal caps are for in-text use too. A really good typeface will have different versions for all kinds of different display conditions. Sometimes several levels of display for headings and above, like posters and signs. There will also be different weights which are important, for example if you are setting light on dark as opposed to dark on light (e.g. on UK road signs a medium font is used for light on dark and heavy for dark on light). It's all about giving the desired optical effect.

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.

I still enjoy some of his later works. James Cameron on the other hand - boggles my mind that he wants to waste his remaining years on that Avatar dreck.

lights Molotov Yes, but which cut?

> I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away

this is bait. berkeley mono out of the box sure doesn't do O0 separation but their "compiler"[0] lets you get a dashed one _very_ easily.

[0] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono#:~:text=Custom...

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 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.

Whoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.

Why?

While what you’re seeing is almost certainly a compression artifact or digitization difficulty (keep in mind, theater screens were the target media,) it was almost certainly a product of phototypesetting, so it would have to be inverted at least once. In phototypesetting, you’d load a large dark negative with a typeface developed into it into a phototypesetting machine. A typesetter would enter the text and whatnot into the machine, and the machine would locate the appropriate letter on the film using some kind of timing mark (the machines were all different) and as the letter passed over the target area, it would shoot light from xenon bulb through it to develop that letter, in the correct place, onto the target film. This is how a lot (most?) typesetting was done in the decades before digitized fonts were a thing. That’s how they got such nice clean lettering on posters and things like that.

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.

IIRC early copies of BladeRunner in the digital era, like the original DVDs of this, really suffered from the lack of detail on red, specifically, from the 4:2:0 color space encoding ( https://spearsandmunsil.com/portfolio-item/choosing-a-color-... ). So some level of oddity around red could come from that.

>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?

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.

Rachael smoking in that scene is almost like a painting, a masterpiece.

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.

I agree. I think some creations are absolutely rare, unique and unlikely artefacts of culture and circumstances. Technology, people, means, vision and all sorts of other aspects had to collide and conspire to bear fruit to these marvels. Especially for big team projects such as movies. Another examples that come to my mind are computer games StarCraft: Brood War and Bioshock: Infinite. Complex visionary collaborative projects resulting in absolute perfection. Wow, just wow. Humanity truly can be amazing if it gets its shit together

Asterisk the director's cut is amazing.

https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono - Is a free, open-source alternative.

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.

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.

It's probably an AI-written article. I was curious enough about the premise, but there wasn't any intention in there, it sort of wanders about going 'ooh'.

I think Rands had too much coffee.

same thing happened on the web, letter-spacing/tracking reveal on scroll is basically the default hero animation now. felt premium a few years back, now it just kinda signals template

The images don't load without javascript, which sadly is customary for the modern web experience.

Which pictures are you missing? I see three stills from the Bladerunner intro sequence, and two embedded videos of it.

I've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code

Nope. It might improve readability for individual words, but for blocks of code with similar features at irregular lengths, uniform kerning provides structure and a bunch of clean edges that help you visually orient yourself. Just like title text and body text generally need different kerning, so do body text and code.

(As a full time developer for over a decade that got a design degree, I have experimented with it a lot!)

Interesting. While the missing word doesn’t contribute any new information, it does convey a feeling. Like a typeface.

Hyphenation isn’t the best for readability, which is especially important with moving text. (That’s also why there was so much leading, so it would be easy to see which line continued the one you’re looking at.) Many of the word combinations that were kept together rather than split up had much more impact together. Reading that the replicants were slave labor has more literary impact than them being slave

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.

I think the placement of Replicant is deliberate. It's heading out of bounds and makes you uneasy when you see it.

>In the world of movie title cards, this one sits in the bottom half.

Really? Are we including B movies, porn, educational films (other than porn) in this massive list?

Welcome to corporate. Swearing will not be tolerated.

I feel like I should have my eyelids taped open strapped into a chair in a very dark room with this being projected on a screen with a loud sound system as part of the resting period between waterboarding sessions because I refuse to telling my inquisitors the answers they are asking.

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 em dashs are a callback to the silent film title cards days –– they represent a pause in speech.

Your education may have been lacking.