This is where an art designer like me comes in – I assist filmmakers/content creators with creating posters and various advertising material for their projects. I have collaborated with professionals from the film, TV music and YouTube circles for digital content creation like poster design, channel design, logo design to give their brand a unique identity. Externally, I have been working as an art director for five years now; mostly focusing on TV commercials and music videos.

My fascination with film-making has been in tact since my childhood. Films and animated TV shows have always played an integral part in my life. I was fond of drawing  cartoon characters and, soon, started sketching life-like portraits, and was able to expand into the digital realm by making digi-paintings and illustrations on Adobe Creative Suite programs. I do not have any favourite “one” filmmaker; I appreciate the works of multiple filmmakers like Nolan, Spielberg, Tarantino, Fincher to Kurosawa or Ray. I believe every filmmaker has their own distinct body of work and I appreciate different elements of all. Though as a child, I was particularly fond of Star Wars, Bond series, The Goonies, Hammer Horror and a lot of the sci-fi/horror films of the 80s. These movies were a great influence on me.

When I turned 16, I got an opportunity to work as a PA on a film set. I wasn’t particularly fond of the process, initially at least. I understood how complex it actually is to make professional movies or TV, because of which I developed a great amount of respect for all of the individuals who work on set for a living. I eventually got over the discomfort that I got being on set, but I realized that the back-end process is something I was better at. And hence I shifted my focus to art design, video editing, colour grading and motion graphics to become fluent with the post production process.

I was doing small graphic design and video editing gigs before I got onto an actual set. It did not take me long to realize that I had a great fascination for posters – especially movie posters as they, on some instances, intrigued me more than the movie itself. Since then I have created more than a thousand poster designs and have also served as an art director on various projects. I have a team of four working with me on the post production process within a proper studio setup.

It has been two years since I launched my company SUM (Sai Unicorn Multimedia). Yet, I feel we are just beginning to scratch the surface. I worked on a project called “Polybius” which stars Sir Tom Atkins from “Fog” and “Halloween”, films which I adored since my childhood. I also got to work with professionals in designing the artwork for the 4K release of The Dark Knight Trilogy for its Asian release, which was very exciting. I am currently working on some projects which will be streaming on Prime and Netflix next year. This is definitely a turning point of my carrier, though I still have a very long way to go before I can call myself successful.

I strongly believe that independent filmmakers and content creators alike deserve better in terms of design. I have seen posters of films which have been screened at Cannes and Sundance, and for most of the brilliant films I saw, the poster design is not anywhere as good as the film itself. I hate to critique someone’s art, but I do feel sometimes that I could have done a better job. I sense that a pre-conceived notion most filmmakers have is that poster design is expensive, which is not true. Hence, I encourage content creators to have a core focus on the art design aspect of their film/video projects, as it plays an vital role in engaging the audience.