painting for the silver screen…
2009.06.15 22:22
From the dimly-lit, makeshift painting studios in the kampungs of Jakarta, people armed with large pieces of white cloth and wall paint are struggling to survive from a not-so-glamorous part of the cinema business.
They are artists of under-appreciated works. Art works that give us a glimpse of the latest movie on the theatre and lure us to book a seat on an easy Sunday. They are the last of their kind, for what they do is gradually being displaced by digital printing technology.
Yasin is among them. That afternoon, the middle-aged man spent extra working hours on a supposedly weekend break in Fausta studio in West Jakarta’s Slipi.
Bare-chested, he painted for hours, perspiring from the heat trapped in the second storey of a house filled with pairs of wooden frames holding the “canvases” unto which Yasin strokes his brush.
“This is due next week. That’s why I’m working on a Sunday,” he said, his eyes focusing on the details of a lion’s face on the poster for a sequel of the fantasy drama movie “Bridge to Terabithia”.
With his left hand holding a print version of the movie’s poster, Yasin dipped medium-sized brushes into small buckets of wall paint. He mixes a little bit of terracotta and a little bit of white, until he got the right hue for the lion’s nose.
His painting board is the floor and his canvas is a two-by-four-meter white fabric of the cheapest kind stretched on wooden frames. One behind him bears the movie title and cast, while the one he’s working on portrays a princess and supporting characters on a meadow. Both will be sewn together and hung outside cinemas in the city.
Yasin and his friend have been working on them since yesterday. Four copies are due this weekend.
“It takes more time to finish a banner if there are lots of details in them. A simple one can actually be done in a day,” said the man who started painting cinema banners and posters some twenty years ago. He can still recall his first work: Anthony Quinn’s “Tigers Don’t Sleep.”
What is simple and what is not?
“Posters with only one or two characters is piece of cake. Something like this is a challenge,” Yasin said, applying detail strokes to the rough figures he finished yesterday.
The highlights on the hair of each character, the shades and shadows on their faces, the glint in their eyes. All the small elements that will make a cinema poster come to life.
“Sorry, I was wrong,” Yasin corrected himself. “Now, this is what you call a challenge.”
He took out a print version of a poster for adventure-comedy movie, “Night at the Museum”. There are at least a dozen characters, each with colorful costumes full of details. Not to mention a dinosaur, a space ship and all the other nitty-gritty.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s simple or complicated. The price is the same,” said Karyo, another painter. From a poster that they finish, each will receive Rp 40,000, just slightly more than the price of a regular cinema ticket.
Like Karyo said, it doesn’t matter whether they finish it in half a day or in two days.
“Orders don’t come regularly, prices of materials are rising and cinema operators are only paying a meager sum,” complained Tirta, owner of the studio, adding that he could only afford to pay the painters that much.
They all have seen better days. The golden days of the cinema industry, and the heyday of manually-painted theatre banners and posters, when orders came flowing in from theatres and production houses.
“In the early 90s, I can buy gold (jewelries) every week with my earnings,” Yasin recalled. Nowadays, the fate of their profession hangs on a thread even though the national cinema industry is back on its feet again.
Not many local production houses choose to advertise their movies with painted cinema banners and posters when digital printing technology offers instant results with only a slightly higher price.
“Sometimes, we need it fast and painting studios cannot provide that,” said Nuri Wuriya who works for a Jakarta-based production house. For their latest comedy movie, they ordered 60 banners from a printing company in East Jakarta, each for Rp 230,000, just slightly above the cost of manually painted posters that ranges between Rp 180,000 and Rp 200,000.
As in most cases, when it comes to speed, accuracy and efficiency, human hands admittedly cannot compete with machines. Although the first still has an added value that machines can’t produce.
It is indeed quite a work, manually painting cinema banners and posters.
First of all, the fabric has to be stretched on wooden frames and then sketched with grid boxes to help transfer images on the master print version poster at the right scale and proportion. In the olden days, painters use to project the master poster into the banner with a flashlight, Karyo explained, but now they rely on the grid.
Painters then start with the easiest part, sketching fonts for the title of the movie that will later on be colored. This is a process they call lettering.
Next come the images, sketched on an already painted background. Main characters first, details, highlights and shadows come later. It’s pretty much the technique that professional naturalist and realist painters apply.
That is perhaps why in the past, painting cinema banners and posters became the training sessions for to-be painters. The late maestro Affandi is among them, as he used to do it for a theatre in Bandung.
Of course, Yasin, Karyo and two of their friends are not as fortunate as Affandi.
“We are just drawers. We are not artists,” Yasin said, adding that his profession was close to its dying days.
From some 20 painting studios in the city, currently only five survive. A studio in Central Jakarta reserves the space for giant banners for Senen’s Grand Theatre, while another one in Depok receive the most order from a chain cinema operator to be distributed nationwide.
The latter is a relatively bigger studio with 10 workers. It belongs to Kemal Rachman who focuses on finding a monthly average order of between 150 to 300 banners for the painters to work on.
Dying because of irregular and infrequent orders is only one of the problems or the profession of cinema banner and poster painter. They are indeed the last of their kind as no younger generation is willing to take up such job.
Most of the painters are above 50 years old, the last generation of painters that started their career in the early 1980s. Unlike other professions that require craftsmanship and an art in talent, this business doesn’t run in the family. Or probably the father chose not to make it so.
“Even if my son wants to do this or have the talent, I won’t allow him,” Yasin said.
“Let us be the last. This profession is dying anyway.”
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1 Comment on “painting for the silver screen…”
Mas, boleh minta alamat studio atau contact number para pelukis ini nggak? Tks.
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