Title design
Drawing and setting the name of a film. From the hand-drawn title sketch for Padayappa in 1999 to the title sequences for Baba and Sivaji.
Home Design & Creative Work
Design & creative work —
the craft the career was built on.
Before she was a producer or a director, Soundarya Rajinikanth was a graphic designer. It is still the discipline that explains the rest of the work: the studio, the pipeline, the technology, the productions.
The discipline
A title is the first frame of a film, and the only one made entirely by a designer.
Title design sits in an unusual position in a production. It is written last and seen first. It has to carry the genre, the register and the scale of a film in a handful of letters, before a single performance has begun.
Soundarya took that brief on for the first time in 1999, sketching the title for Padayappa. Over the following eight years she designed titles and graphics for nine more Tamil features, including the title sequences for Baba (2002) and Sivaji (2007).
Her formal training supports it: graphic design at Central TAFE in Perth, followed by a degree in multimedia from Edith Cowan University. Composition, typography, image-making and the software that assembles them — then the film industry as the place to apply all four.
Title index
Ten films, in her department.
The complete list of features Soundarya Rajinikanth is credited on as graphic or title designer, set here as a typographic index.
1999 — Title sketch
Padayappa
2002 — Title sequence
Baba
2005 — Graphic design
Chandramukhi · Anbe Aaruyire · Sivakasi · Majaa · Sandakozhi
2007 — Title sequence & graphics
Sivaji · Chennai 600028
2014 — Graphic design, alongside direction
Kochadaiiyaan
Discipline
Typography · Composition · Motion · Visual effects
The lettering above is set for this website. No original title artwork is reproduced — the film titles themselves remain the property of their respective producers.
Areas of practice
Six things the same training made possible.
Title design1999 – 2014
Visual effects2005 – 2010
Motion capture2010 – 2014
Creative production2018 – present
Film graphics
Graphic design across a run of Tamil features in 2005 and 2007 — the on-screen material that carries a film’s identity beyond its opening card.
Visual effects
Ocher Studios, founded in 2005, specialised in visual effects and pre-production services, growing to a team of around eighty by 2008.
Performance capture
Kochadaiiyaan was built on photorealistic motion capture recorded at Pinewood Studios in London, with animation completed in the United States, Hong Kong and China.
Post-production
May6 Entertainment describes its post-production work as finishing a film frame by frame — motion graphics, sound engineering, visual effects and distribution strategy.
Creative production
On Gangs — Kuruthi Punal for Prime Video she is credited as creative producer — the design sensibility applied to a whole series rather than a single sequence.
How the work is made
One production, three stages.
The working method set out by May6 Entertainment, the company Soundarya established in Chennai in 2018.
01
Pre-production
Creative writing, storyline development and casting — the stage at which a film’s shape, and its people, are decided.
02
Production
Filming, with what the company describes as meticulous attention to detail. The practical translation of the design work already done.
03
Post-production
Finishing frame by frame — motion graphics, sound engineering, visual effects, and the distribution strategy that determines who eventually sees the film.
“Our vision is to produce top notch quality content that resonates with regional and global audiences.” May6 Entertainment — founded by Soundarya Rajinikanth, 3 September 2018
Beyond the screen
When the medium runs out, build a new one.
In 2021 Soundarya co-founded Hoote, a social platform built entirely around the human voice: sixty-second voice notes instead of text, announced as the first voice-based social network launched from India and planned for fifteen Indian and ten international languages.
The origin is characteristically direct. Her father sent her a voice note while he was shooting Annaatthe; she recognised that hearing a person speak in their own language carries something a written post cannot. The name comes from the call of the owl — long read as a symbol of wisdom.
It is the same instinct that produced the title cards and the motion-capture feature: identify the part of the experience nobody is designing properly, then design it.
The films these skills were built for.
Every credit, from the first title sketch to the current production.