Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles

are you tried of romantic comedies? then please watch this movie which opens today in cinemas nationwide!

i'm sure nitpickers will find something they don't like about the movie. i did. i'm not happy with the CG in the latter part. but if you are a CG person, you will understand why that is so and still be amazed that the CG artists were able to accomplish this feat in such a short time and with technology way older than what Hollywood is currently using. 

when i asked if we can really achieve the Hollywood style CG effects, it turns out we cannot. it's because we don't have the motion capture technology which movies like Avatar, Planet of the Apes and Lord of The Rings used to create realistic characters like Gollum. 

just read this link to learn how a character like Gollum was created...

Photo courtesy of New Line

and that's just for one CG character. for Tiktik, there were only 60 artists more or less to do everything in just a year so it's really a feat in itself.

i also learned that for each CG character with the optimum CG effects, rendering takes about 11-14minutes per frame. PER FRAME! imagine how long it would take to render a 1-minute action sequence that way?  

(calculation: if per second, you have 24 frames x 60seconds = 1440 frames/minute. multiply that by 11minutes and it will take you 15840 minutes or 640 hours (27days) just for a minute of CG effects! is my Math correct? :[ )

anyway, that's why the visual effects supervisor's job is very important. aside from making sure that the artists deliver, he also has to calculate render time per CG. some of the CG effects were rendered in their optimum render time which was 11-14 minutes/frame. but some had to be sacrificed and brought down from 11 minutes to 3-4 minutes or else they couldn't have been shown today.  

now this is the sad part: i asked if we can ever get the motion capture technology that Hollywood is now using and the answer is (maybe) in 10 years. in 10 years, i wonder what kind of amazing technology Hollywood would have by then. 

but who knows? we have our first movie shot entirely on green screen. maybe this is the start of better things to come for Philippine movies.