With posters comes popularity -THT

With posters comes popularity

PRAKRITI PATHAK    

KATHMANDU: Things are happening really fast for young graphic designer, Swapnil Acharya, who is just a year old in the film industry. After the historic success of the Nepali movie Loot, Acharya’s schedule is jam packed creating innovative designs for movie posters.

Naturally a movie buff, Acharya began poster designing after an encounter with Deepak Rauniyar, director of the movie Highway. “When opportunity knocked to create a unique poster for new films, I took it as a challenge and interpreted the movie’s essence with novel style and individual-ity, which was acclaimed by Rauniyar,” shares Acharya. He is grateful that his career took off working with big ‘A-listed’ movie makers through a friend’s connection. As he was new in designing, Acharya initially had a tough time, but quickly learnt the trade technicalities.

Previously, he worked in Diyalo Technologies as a corporate designer for almost a year, which mostly dealt with book covers and brochures. Along with it, he also worked as creative head in Karobar, a Nepali language daily economic newspaper, but quit after six months. “Frankly speaking, my tenure in Karobar blocked my creativity,” quips Acharya but is quick to maintain that Karobar taught him to cope with deadlines.

He was fascinated with movie making since childhood. Though his first work was on the movie poster for Highway, Loot marked his debut, giving a break to traditional posters of Kollywood. “Conventional movies lack exciting poster work and it is high time directors and producers realised the importance of a good poster in hitting the right chord with the masses,” says Acharya. He states that the approach of movie making is changing, along with the story. “Movie posters also determine success and every good film could be a box-office hit, if aided by the right, attractive and clear poster,” says Acharya. He feels that most movie posters still look similar and lack creativity, innovation and originality.

However, Acharya himself was unsure about the career path he had chosen. “Audience reaction matters the most in the celluloid world and our team was very anxious about the move but luck-ily, the majority were able to grasp our concept,” says Acharya adding that many conventional designers were, however, unenthused at best. Acharya feels that there exists a vacuum between the making of traditional and new movies but stressed that for the progress of the industry, there must be a medium to bridge the gap.

Having also shown his creativity in Visa Girl and Saayad, Acharya’s upcoming projects include Badhshala, 3 Lovers, Uma, among others. Now, with so much buzz, he is contemplating a new business. “Perhaps I will open an agency that solely looks after movie packaging,” says Acharya.

Source : HIMALAYAN NEWS SERVICE | Read the main article at The Himalayan Times