Kochi-based Tuney John has been making huge strides in Kollywood. A sought-after designer, he has created posters for more than 90 films in Tamil. His first was Venkat Prabhu’s Saroja. Ask him how it all began, he says, “I didn’t plan anything. While studying in Bharat Matha College, Thrikkakara, our batch conducted an inter-college fest, for which I did all the designing work. Everyone appreciated them and said I had the potential to become a good designer. Further I studied in SAE College in Chennai, from where I became friends with Alphonse, Rajesh Murugeshan and Sabareesh Varma (Neram’s music director and singer respectively). Initially, I worked with some agencies and did some freelancing too.” Tuney now has his own ad agency ‘24am’ in Chennai.
Does he have a criteria for creating motifs for the posters? He says, “For each film it is different. Some directors such as Alphonse and Karthik Subbaraj (Pizza and Jigarthanda) send the whole script, but some may not like to reveal their stories and just narrate some instances and based on them I design the posters.” Suriya-starrer Anjaan, Vijay’s Jilla, Karthik’s Madras, Siddharth’s Jigarthanda, Ko and Simbu’s Vinnaithandi Varuvaya are some of his noticeable works. His latest work is the refreshing poster for Alphonse Puthren’s upcoming Malayalam film Premam. This is Tuney’s second Malayalam poster and his second with Alphonse after his debut film Neram. The first look poster of Premam, which was released in the social media platform a few days ago, was a whiff of freshness. The aesthetically sketched out Malayalam typographic fonts were arranged so as to look like a flying butterfly.
“The works for Premam started last February. More than 20 something posters were designed but we weren’t satisfied,” says Tuney. “It was during October, after watching some initial shots of the film that a spark of designing the title like a butterfly hit me. Moreover, the word is a common and cliched one, it was a challenge to design with an entirely different and catchy style. Even the colour scheme for the butterfly was decided after trying out many colours and I wanted to give a retro feel in the background and hence the bluish green colour of the 90s era,” he says. Ask him which poster was the most challenging for him, he says, “Though every work is a challenge, bringing all the main characters in Neram’s poster was tough. And also Premam is my favourite. I didn’t expect the poster to go viral and win a lot of praise and applause.” Tuney is now busy with designing the posters of upcoming Suriya movie Mass and Vijay’s Puli. “If we have a good idea and concept, the poster is most likely to click. When hundreds of corporate advertisements are mushrooming on the roads every day, it is hard to compete with them. But with a stunning perfect colour combination and an interesting idea, we can hold people’s attention on our creatives too,” says Tuney.