Hollywood Minimal Posters Third Edition

Now You See Me
Now You See Me
Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver
South Park
South Park
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
500 Days of Summer
500 Days of Summer
Requiem for a Dream
Requiem for a Dream
Premium Rush
Premium Rush
Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind
Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind
Primer
Primer

Seinfeld: The Outing

Seinfeld: The Outing

Minimal Poster: Seinfeld: The Outing

Made after Supreme Court of India thought of not messing with Article 377 and passing the buck to Parliament.

You may be as straight as straight can be and non-gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You have your fundamental rights to do whatever you want to do in your privacy provided that you don’t hurt anybody or yourself. From where should I take out time to be even bothered to be annoyed at someone else’s lifestyle, apart from being jealous, is beyond me.

When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth

It was sometime in ’93 or ’94 when my uncle took me to Premprakash Cinema Hall in Jaipur. We tried to get the seats but apparently it was House Full. We had already given up but then my uncle thought of giving one more chance and tried our luck at Lower Dress Circle window. Luckily, there were 2 tickets available of the front row seats. The tickets were small chits of Pink Color, 14 Rupees each probably (and the parking chit was yellow in color, 3 Rupees), if I can guess correctly, give or take 5-10 Rupees here and there. Then I got to see, probably my first English movie (dubbed in Hindi obviously) in a cinema hall, and the movie was called Jurassic Park.

Now when you see a movie, that too an action-adventure genre, from the front row seats, everything looks real. Jurassic Park that time was watched without 3D, without IMAX and surely without Dolby Digital Surround system as well. So, what was shown on the screen was unadulterated loud and on your face fun! I was thrilled, I was frightened, I was amazed and I became its life long fan. When I was coming back from the theater, sitting on the pillion seat of the Blue colored Bajaj Chetak, we went past many camels on the way home. Those camels looked as frightening as the velociraptors. I bought dinosaurs merchandize later, along with one 10 inch tall plastic each-part-detachable skeleton of T-Rex, which was later hidden away somewhere by my mother because, unusually, it happened to be unlucky somehow. When the skeleton was sitting pretty and handsomely on the TV Trolley, my brother got his hand fractured and my father’s car got hit. So the toy went underground soon. Still, the love for Dinosaurs and JP never stopped. I went on to see The Lost World (1997) thrice in cinema hall (and it was the first movie I was allowed to watch alone in theaters with friends). Even our school took us to watch that movie. Meanwhile, whenever Jurassic Park was aired on TV, I watched it. From 1994 till 2013, if it had been shown 200 times, I would have watched 100 times at least. I stopped counting after the century.

Now on 6th April 2013, I got another chance to see the magic on big screen again. That too in IMAX 3D at Bangalore. I went to the theater and saw kids who weren’t even born in 1994 flocking in with their parents. It gave a sense of aging. Sigh. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie on the screen as much as I had done 19 years ago.

The movie had so much effect on me that I had even decided to become a paleontologist when I grew up. (Although I didn’t end up being one).

I can still remember the white shorts and jungle-scene shirt, I had worn on that day because after few days when those clothes got washed, the upper pocket of the shirt still had the crumbled pink chits.

Here’s a small tribute poster I have made for the movie:

Jurassic Park Minimal Poster
Jurassic Park Minimal Poster

Minimal Hollywood Posters – Second Edition

Django Unchained
Django Unchained

They Live
They Live

The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker

Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty

Office Space
Office Space

Argo
Argo

 

Minimal Hollywood Posters – First Edition

Hollywood Minimal Posters

Publishing some of the minimal posters I had made for Hollywood movies.

Life of Pi
Life of Pi

Looper
Looper

Schindler's List
Schindler’s List

Skyfall
Skyfall

The Artist
The Artist

1408
1408

 

Some of these posters have been featured on Minimal Movie Posters tumblr and all of them can also be found on Minimal Movie Posters India Facebook page.

The Story of Minimal Movie Posters India

When in life, one goes to a rock concert, the feeling of envy creeps into the skin. You immediately want to be the one who is throwing his head with a microphone in the hand. You want to be that guitarist who is making the crowd go crazy. While you actual sit in a lame seat in one side of the stage only able to tap your foot with the thumping beats of the drums, you mentally want to jump on to the stage to sing that number which you sing the best in turn making the fans shout out your name loud and girls screaming at the top of their voices.

When you see someone dance on the stage with poise and style, moving elegantly, each move calculated and brilliantly performed, you want to be that person and win the hearts of the viewers by doing those lovely steps. In your mind, you imagine your entrance into the scene and making the auditorium go berserk with fans whistling and hooting for you while in reality you are just tapping your fingers and thinking of what could have been a better step which the dancer missed. You want to hold the dance partner in your arms and make people give oohs and aahs while watching you two dance in tandem.

When you watch that sports match of your school or college from outside the boundary, in your mind, you want to be on the field, you want the crowd to chant your name. You want to take the catch diving and sliding. You want to hit the ball out of the boundary as hard as you can. You want to bowl so fast that the stumps breaks into two. You want to hear the audience scream your name as loud as it can be. But…

But this usually never happens. You live your life like an average person does. You go perform your daily chores thinking that hoping is another thing, reality is another. You believe in fate and give up on your confidence. The peculiar feeling of jealousy and helplessness shadows your mind and you accept it. You assume that not everyone can get fame the way they deserve. You doubt your ability to do the things you like doing. This assumption hinders your mind to think beyond what you could have achieved by thinking a little more. But you assume that this is how life is going to be like so you stay the same. Average.

Hello there! I am talking about myself and you too probably. We are the average guys. We know that we deserve something better and we are not alone to deserve that. But then things happen if we believe in ourself. I am unable to write any motivational blogpost because I don’t want to but this post will tell you something if you haven’t been reading newspapers regularly nowadays.

There is a very rare chance but if you follow this blog then you will know that I started that http://MinimalMoviePostersIndia.tumblr.com blog one fine day on 5th of January 2012 after being inspired by the original Hollywood one whose link I am not sharing here. I had started it for my own pastime but then people started liking and contributing to it. AR Hemant was probably the first person who appreciated the work and then also contributed to it and shared the same with some of his friends. I became we and people liked it. I was very reluctant to publicize it as I thought if it is good enough people will automatically get to know this. Idiotic I say. When you can, you should make full use of the resources to show people your stuff, as many people told me this soon.

I asked few of my online friends like Meghana Kulkarni who had interest in designing and movies to contribute. She also came along and shared her stuff. More people liked it. And then we had enough posters to be called ourself as a website a well fed growing site. More people started contributing and our engine started and we took off.

On 29th February someone from Mumbai Mirror noticed our work and published a small but important story that was our first story that got published in any newspaper. Meghana was pro-active in getting a 10 day slot at Grubshup, Pune to hold our first ever exhibition that helped us gain enough velocity launch into the right orbit. On Twitter, I shared the link of the Golmaal poster because of some #SameGuy tweet to the genius @diogeneb and when he retweeted, the site went viral. We got around 900 odd hits that day. This made us established into the correct orbit.

I being the face of MMPIndia, by chance, got phone calls from Indian Express Pune, Pune Mirror, Hindustan Times Mumbai and DNA Mumbai.  Yahoo!, thanks to AR Hemant again, featured our website on their front page. That was huge! The number of hits on the site amplified and we reached more than 1000 hits that day.

6th March, I went to watch Paan Singh Tomar. After I came back, I made that poster which still half of the world doesn’t understand. Somebody shared the poster link to Anurag Kashyap who shared it with Irrfan Khan. And on that day I got phone calls from both of them. Take a pause. Breathe. Yes. I got actual real phone calls from both of them. I mean wow. Anurag Kashyap said ‘Damn good job’ at least 4 times that day. Irrfan Khan, the PST himself, loved the poster and asked for high resolution copy of it. In the same week, I got to know that my tenure in the client office is about to get over. Bench period was knocking again. But it didn’t happen though.

Next week, I made the Kahaani poster. Somebody again shared the link to Sujoy Ghosh. Somebody was most probably @navjotlive. Sujoy shared it with Vishal Dadlani who wanted the poster for his T Shirt. Same day, Sujoy Ghosh called me on phone and again, I was amazed and still cannot believe it.. Site is on 99 posters as I write and queue already has few posts to be published soon.

Since then we have been featured several times on various websites and newspapers, with and without credit but that happens because it is Internet. We have inspired many people to start up their own Minimal posters pages and some of them didn’t thank us for the inspiration but that’s okay again. Let them enjoy the fame they got because of us but I would certainly like to thank few people, not in any specific order but here are their names: Hemant, Meghana, Hirni, Shaunak , Madhuri, Harshita, Anish, Rajat, Abhishek, Ankur, Sogani, Ojasvi, Vinod Raman, Navjot Gulati and all my friends who saw the work and helped it to become more famous. I cannot write name of everyone but you know it and I know it 🙂

So things for the average guy has been going pretty fine since few days. It was an average day and an average artwork graphically but it was simple and was made with simple intention of bringing few smiles on the faces. We have been able to do it till now. Hoping that this shall continue, before I sign off to make more posters, I would like to dedicate the happenings of last 3 months to few people. They being: Rahul Dravid (for whom I wanted to write the longest ever dedication post but couldn’t do it) and Sachin Tendulkar (for being the God himself, what to say about him) and to all the teetotalers and vegetarians of the world 😉

P.S.: The 100th poster, by number, is shown below.

Minimal Movie Posters India
Minimal Movie Posters India