stories of a journeyman

THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR…a design-print-dance-something-movie against the ban on dancing in the city of Bangalore

One of the projects that I did in India was this video which I finally completed editing. The reason of dancing is pretty obvious. There’s no bollywood movie without dancing. Although it looks more like an oldschool Tamil movie I named it Bollywood movie star so people from other parts of the world would understand. The quality of a Bollywood movie nowadays unfortunately is not within my budget.

The other reason for dancing EVERYWHERE I appear in the video is a form of protest against a weird law, installed a couple of years back from the Bangalore government. First it was the closing hour at 11:30pm. After a while they totally went nuts and banned dancing. Yes, dancing is prohobited in the city of Bangalore. But it’s not so much the dancing that the government wanted to get rid of but much more the noise of loud music. Some more things play a role in that law and how they got to install it. Get your infos about it at the links below.

German: http://javeja.wordpress.com/2008/03/18/tanzverbot-in-bangalore
Englisch: http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/travel/26bangalore.html

It’s quite hard to get the status quo of this obscure law and I’m welcome for any new links on that.
All I know…the last time I went to a club with the licence to dance ( sounds so slapstick! ), 11:30pm the lights turned on and the crowd shouted “FUCK THE POLICE…” for around 10 minutes and then everyone left.

To come back to the project and its making of:
I did the Photoshop work on the poster that I created out of one of the first dance scenes. With the file I went to a digital printer and got an A3 format colour print. With this print I went to the oldschool Lithography printers ( we finally could find some place in the city. Of course, they have no internet adress or anything that makes it easy to spot them ) and asked for a real indian movie poster.

One and a half weeks later, finally the artist who was supposed to do the drawing arrived. They first needed to blow up the poster to the size of 30×20 inches and printed it mirrored on thinner paper so they could draw on the paper and press it on the metal plate that would be the negative form for printing. Two plates in total, one for the fine lines in black and one for colour gradients.

With the plates we went to the printing workshop with those giant mechanical printing machines. It was amazing. The paper was placed by hand and even the color gradient was done by dripping different colors on the pressing roll. As you can imagine, the first poster looked totally different to the last one.

Great fun – whenever you get the chance to do that in Bangalore, go for it.

I’m gonna dance and dance and dance
fabsn

// If you want to buy an original poster from the video THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR, write me a message. And hurry, they are limited to 80 pieces only. 10€/13US$ per Poster ( plus shipping ) //

All status’ of printing – click to enlarge

Wheat-pasting it for the grand final rain shoot – click to enlarge

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A regular movie poster shot by Matt Lee. Check out the small documentary he created about the Lithography printing.