Minimal Film project was conceived after the global success reached by the publishing of two famous books “Life in Five Seconds” and “Film in Five Seconds” by Shortology. Minimal Film was launched in 2018 by the publishing house, an important editor specialized both in arts and design publication, with the objective to create the next step for the use of the graphic synthesis (typical of Shortology’s world). How we did it? Trying to describe the most famous films worldwide through a few graphic elements evoking images and plots, with a very simple approach. Which is the objective? Massive pleasure to those who love cinema! Minimal Film reached a global circulation thanks to the English version, and the Spanish version by FlowPress (which has been distribution too in Southern America).

Minimal Film is a book about cinema which was described through the magic visual of graphic design, with extreme synthesis and simplicity of shapes and colors, which makes each illustration unique and effective. Since Minimal Film draws its origin from the philosophy of Shortology, we used the same direct language able to narrate anything through pictograms. This publication is based on a simple notion: eliminating the superfluous and focusing on the essential. Our idea was to synthesize as much as possible the plot of the most famous films in the history of cinema, with few graphic elements capable of bringing the reader to those worlds. We wanted to flow hours and hours of film into a single page, creating an evocative book dedicated to the cinema’s enthusiastics, arousing an emotion to the lovers of the seventh art.

Each illustration was created with Illustrator and paginated in InDesign. The first step was to collect simple elements and shapes such as triangles, circles, squares and start to gather them, trying to recreate basic shapes but also able to describe elements related to the films, such as a trapezoid representing a ship and a triangle representing an iceberg. What movie are we going to talk about?

We were able to produce a book which is distributed worldwide thanks to the support of the big publishing house, leader in the sector of art and design. Minimal Film project gave us the chance to improve the awareness of Shortology on global basis, amplifying also the fanbase on its social pages. The project has been reprised by several magazines and blogs dedicated both to the movie and design world, as well as movie critics. As concerned the cultural impact in the country of origin, we dedicated an exhibition with a on stage presentation in Spazio Oberdan in Milan, a historic cinema, museum and cultural point that presents every year exhibits regarding the most interesting projects dedicated to cinema, and not only.