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The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

402 points · 196 comments · ExMachina73

  1. Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
    > 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>

    [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OCR-A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OCR-A

    1. teraflop · · focus · HN ↗
      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&#x27;s easy to see how things could get slightly misaligned.

      Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It&#x27;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.

      1. toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
        In older films and lower budget films into the 90s, you could expect the titles to wobble up and down and left and right from frame to frame, too.
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