reminiscing an already extinct profession…
2009.06.16 02:02
This is Part II of kucingputi’s piece on movie banner and poster painters. Enjoy!
If cinema banner painters are pessimistically waiting for their final day, a similar profession has taken their last breath a decade ago.
“I can’t even remember the last time I made a movie poster,” said 55-year old Rusdi, a graphic designer who used to do airbrush posters of action movies during the 1980s.
His six-square meter studio on the upper-floor of his home in a small alley in Central Jakarta’s Petamburan used to witness the designing process of Hollywood movie posters to decorate cinemas in the city.
Photographs of the posters for Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard”, Van Damme’s “Cyborg” and dozen other B-movies that used to be the hype in cinemas are the only remnants of Rusdi’s old profession.
Slightly different from painting outdoor cinema banners, designing and finishing the master for indoor paper cinema poster seems to require more imagination as the artists are only given snapshots from certain movies.
“If the theaters are using the original posters that they got from the movie producers, they wouldn’t attract visitors. They are too simple,” said Lukman, Rusdi’s younger brother who also used to live from designing posters.
These artists had to transform the simple posters into one that would appeal to the eyes of Indonesian movie-goers.
“We would usually take the images of the main characters, paste them on a 60×90-centimeter paper, and add background landscape and scenes with an airbrush,” Lukman explained.
For action movies, they added scenes of explosion and for others mostly just cityscapes.
“Indonesians like it like that. An action movie poster must look really catchy and so we often made up explosion or battles scenes that were actually not in the movie,” said Rusdi.
Part of the art of making posters lies in composing pictures of the main characters, movie titles and background scenes. Airbrushing techniques help in making it into a smooth composition without a too stark difference between the background and the photos.
Once the posters are ready, it would then be reproduced and distributed to cinema houses.
But, that was then. Today, computers have completely taken their place. Photos of the actors and actresses in action are collaged with computer programs and special effects for posters are no longer added with real airbrush.
Meanwhile, movie and credit titles for those movies are no longer hand-drawn using plastic templates, but are now typed in the desired fonts. One that could be changed with a click of a mouse to other font types.
And so Rusdi and Lukman closed one chapter of their life and began another, screen printing company logos on freebies like mugs or name car holders.
“I sometimes miss doing posters. But, it’s just down memory lane now,” Lukman said.
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1 Comment on “reminiscing an already extinct profession…”
mas, boleh minta alamat dan nomor kontak Pak Lukman? Saya tertarik untuk membuat artikelnya. Ditunggu jawabannya ya mas, ke email aja. Thanks. :)
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