Motivation for the Research
It happened during my Masters thesis titled “Lettering in Bollywood Film Posters” at the Department of Design, IIT Guwahati. Despite the existence of so many languages and scripts, the concern and knowledge about typography in India is less explored.
Area of Focus
- Research on Bollywood movie posters
However, the deeper research to determine the role and development of the title design over the timeline is lacking. Preliminary research shows that the Latin script title design has dominated the timeline and in most cases has been preferred over Devanagari and Urdu scripts.
Aim, Objectives and Research Questions
The first group includes two research questions which are concerned with understanding the development in the design of the title and finding the main characteristic features related to it. What are the trends in the main characteristic features related to title design in Bollywood posters.
Methodology of the Study
Semantics has been used to understand the meaning-making nature of various elements, while; pragmatics provides insight into the role of context in the development of title design. Wijnholds (1997) 'aspects of typography' and Rob Carter (1997) 'typeface . morphology' has been used as a guideline to find various characteristic features in the title design.
Insights from the chapter
The obtained result is presented in the form of a radial graph specially developed for this study. The study also covers a detailed investigation of Bollywood poster design, which includes compositional interpretation, poster design practices and the role of context in the development of film posters.
Indian Cinema
- Regional cinemas
- Bollywood/Hindi Cinema
Franz Osten was also credited with directing Achhut Kanya (1936), one of the classics of Indian cinema. It was a period of revival in the Hollywood industry after the demise of the studio system.
Movie publicity
- Movie publicity in Bollywood
The following section will look at the history of film advertising in Bollywood cinema, focusing on the evolution of advertising media and materials. In Bollywood, film advertising started with a very basic form announcing the release of the film in a busy public place with all the details.
Poster design in Bollywood
- The production site
- The image site
- The audiencing site
Friedlander suggests that, "The middle appears as a distinguished position and towards the sides the importance of locality increases less" (Friedlander, 1941). From the beginning, all publicity materials were designed in color, regardless of the film print17. According to Simrat Brar (a poster designer), most films have four to five posters to reflect various genre elements in the film.
The third was with the central theme of the film, i.e. sports drama. For example, most of S. Rahman's artwork shows guns and gunfire in the background to give the audience a sense of action and combat in the film (Figure 2.37). The popularity of movie stars is related to the audience and played an important role in the compositional pattern of the poster (Mazumdar, 2003).
Popular stars have maximum emphasis in poster layout regardless of the movie theme (Blamey & D'Souza, 2005).
Insights from literature review
- Major development in Indian cinema and movie publicity
- Findings from literature review
This period witnessed a shift in film publicity from text-based advertisements to text-based advertisements with images in the form of film brochures. The expressionist style using strong brushwork and vivid colors becomes more evident in publicity materials, especially movie posters. Highlighting the faces of movie stars, collage-like composition, large expressive 3D titles were still the dominant characteristic features of publicity materials.
However, despite the recognition of the importance of the title in movie posters, the literature on title design is limited. It is like a logo whose presence is seen everywhere, especially in publicity materials. It also helps create a connection to the story as well as other design elements in the poster layout.
This chapter examines these aspects in terms of their meaning and role in title design.
Methodology
- Semiotics
At the same time, flame and cracks are directly related to the literal meaning of the word Sholay which is Embers. The study of semiotics can help us to be more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles that everyone plays in its construction. Therefore, a 'representative' is the symbol or the form of the sign takes equivalent to the Saussure's 'signifier'.
Whereas an 'interpretant' is the meaning we make from the sign, similar in meaning to Saussure's 'signified' except that it is a sign in the mind of the interpreter (Lanir, 2012). Here is the interpretation or sense understood from the sign for viewers that there is a guy who is influenced by western culture (hat with feather indicates the same) and an Indian girl (the bride) who is in love. It is useful to understand the structural relationship between the parts of the sign in place of the image itself.
This approach is used to understand the meaning-making nature of all design elements in relation to the film's genre or story.
Analysis
- Syntactic approach
- Semantic approach
- Pragmatic approach
Appearance of the title, letterform features and external elements played a key role in the title design and its expressiveness. Sometimes it is used to support the literal meaning of the title such as Lakshya (2004). Mixed letter weight was also used to create emphasis in certain part of the title.
This is achieved by manipulating the letterform structure or using colors (Figure 3.41). Therefore, in most cases the titles are placed in the dark part of the poster layout. Sometimes only part of the letter is replaced by the image based on the storyline or sound of the title.
For example in the movie poster The Train (1970), the title takes a form of the railway bridge. In the beginning, title designs show very minimal variations in letterforms, regardless of the meaning of the title. In most cases, grunge and broken letterform were used in the title designs to reflect the suffering (Figure 3.61).
Findings
Semantics Reveals the influence of the meanings of the film's title and theme on the visual features used in the design of the title. It also provides an understanding of the role of display in relation to the placement of titles in poster layout, the display medium in terms of providing the freedom to use any colour, and poster making techniques in terms of providing different visuals. The title acts as a logotype for the film and plays an important role in communicating the theme of the film.
For example, rounded shapes are associated with comedy, while sharp and edgy are associated with action and adventure. Visual Texture Portrays denotative and connotative meanings related to mood and theme of the movie. Serves as an effective tool to communicate the theme of the films to the illiterate as well as the literate audience.
RQ3: What are the trends in the main features related to the title design in Bollywood movie posters.
Sampling
- Coding system
Film titles collected for the analysis were divided into two groups; pre-digital and digital to see the effect of technology. Other criteria taken into account are the importance of the film in the history of Indian cinema and their association with key figures such as directors, stars, music directors and writers (Dwyer, 2005). The book contains important films that set a benchmark in Hindi cinema history and have historical importance in its development (Raheja &. Kothari, 2004).
Box office collection is one of the most important criteria to judge the popularity of a film. This data can be used to identify the most popular films in the given years with a maximum number of codes. Of these, 105 films did not make the list for the analysis because their film posters were not available.
It is believed that Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) used one of the first digitally designed posters for the film advertisement (Devraj & Bouman, 2010).
Methodology
Expert interviews and literature indicate that a major transformation in poster design took place during the transition from manual practice to the digital. Through interviews and literature, it is also clear that computer took over the manual and mixed techniques by the mid 90s (Chudasama, 2015; Nanda, 2015). Even though the digital posters were dominant after the mid-1990s, the practice of hand-painted posters was still in use in some cases.
It can also help reduce the complexity of media content by reducing it to a small number of codes that can be counted and analyzed statistically. It is a good method for answering questions related to prioritization, bias or historical changes in media content (Bell P., 2001). Content analysis asks exclusively about the compositional modalities at the site of the image, which is largely related to the compositional interpretation.
Although content analysis offers a clear method for systematically analyzing a large number of images, different researchers have a different view on the use and importance of this method.
Analysis
- Language
- Script
- Position
- Shape
- Direction
- Size
- Face
- Case
- Weight
- Stroke
- Style
- Letter spacing
- Dimension & Perspective
- Visual texture
- Colour
- External elements
It is interesting to note that in the digital age, the use of Hindustani language has drastically decreased by almost 26.9% and English by 24.4%. The increase in the number of English words may have several reasons; one of these may be the adaptation of English words into contemporary spoken language. Similar to language, script usage is influenced by the socio-cultural scenario during the specific period.
A slight variation between pre-digital and digital timeline shows that changes in technology do not significantly affect the positioning of the title in the poster layout. Titles that take up more than 15% of the area in the poster layout are considered 'Large'. There is a small increase of 4.4% in the use of sans serifs and a decrease of 9.7% in the use of serifs during the digital timeline.
The preference for a particular typeface may have been dictated by the theme of the film (see section 3.2.1) and developments in typography, rather than advances in technology.
Findings
Conclusion
Major contribution of the study
Limitations of this study
Possibilities for future research
