REVERSION - My first Movie as a Director

Okay guys,


I been getting quite a bit of feedback on this one, but not from peers in the Philippines.
It's really quite surprising, kasi, I posted this on 3dpinoy and parang walang tao yata diyan.

So dito naman ako:

reversionmovie . blogspot . com

Our trailer came out about two weeks ago.
We're finishing REVERSION in time for the planned August 8 online premiere.

Actually, enhancing it is the better description.

So Ciao for now.

Mabuhay kayong lahat.

very nice!

try ko mag blender

ive seen this link sa cgtalk.. kudos to your team.. matindi tinding effort and time ang kailangan para makatapos ng short....

wow ganda nito sir congrats can't wait to see the full movie.

Nice work sir & your Team...)

Sir wala po akong masabi sa gawa nyo... Sobrang ganda nito galing sir hanep na hanep...

Congrats dito bro. Subrang galing.

Reminds of Resident Evil and Starship Troopers animation.

Great Work and Talent

E for effort galing

bali yung 1 software lang yung gamit nito Blender lang?
sorry di ko na read yung blog kasi wala time sa net cafe ehehe

ayos na ayos to

Hello all peeps,


Thanks for the response!

@zagvot: Yes this entire thing is done in Blender... Modeling, Animation, VFX, Compositing, and Film Editing (even the Cross-Fades).

quite a lot has happened since the trailer came out you can check out the blog at reversionmovie . blogspot . com to know more.

Incidentally, how would you guys feel about making a full length film that's kinda like this one... but of course larger scale.... and looks more like Digic Pictures' work?

I was talking to a fellow Filipino artist who came from ILM and he was of the opinion that the Filipino could be making "animation for the world".

So I wanted to know what people think about it. Obviously when you see REVERSION, you can see my stand on that matter.

If you have the same notion in your minds... And if you work already in the professional environment here in the Philippines.. What are the difficulties or obstacles? Why has it not happened yet?

Discuss!

wooooooow ang galing

russelyacat wrote:wooooooow ang galing

Glad you like it.

CGIPadawan wrote:Incidentally, how would you guys feel about making a full length film that's kinda like this one... but of course larger scale.... and looks more like Digic Pictures' work?

I was talking to a fellow Filipino artist who came from ILM and he was of the opinion that the Filipino could be making "animation for the world".

So I wanted to know what people think about it. Obviously when you see REVERSION, you can see my stand on that matter.

If you have the same notion in your minds... And if you work already in the professional environment here in the Philippines.. What are the difficulties or obstacles? Why has it not happened yet?

Discuss!

wow congrats, i'm impressed. maybe you should pitch your stuff to major
producers for funding. wala pa yatang seed funding para sa animation
industry sa pinas kaya walang platform para i-harness at i-promote ang
mga talento (for full-length). pati ang audience reach ay very limited pag walang tag ng major producers. maybe keep on sending your work as entries to animation festivals baka may producers na magka-interest. i hope you could make it big in the larger spectrum sir. goodluck

Well OK... I understand that political aspect. Every studio system around the world is highly political.

But what I'm talking about is.... From a marketing or from an artistic sense.

we tried doing this kind of stuff before (short film) ang nakalaban namin is patience, motivation, masaya lang sa meeting, planning and sa mismong start ng production pero once na mag simula na..ayan, darating sa point na may tatamarin, brain drain, mawawala yung motivation..

that's why i'm so impress sa inyo sir nakatapos kayu at sobrang haba pa... by the way all filipino team po ba ito?

Well our team came together "the old fashioned way":

Me: "Hey! You're a pretty good artist. I have this script. Why don't you read it and tell me if you want to make this movie. I think you will be very good for this."

*Artist reads script*

Artist: "Ok! This sounds great! What do I need to do?"

So recruiting this way, with all of us being students... We ended up with a mixed bag. We had one VFX artist in Australia, another in Louisiana. Our Sound Designer was from California, the Composer was from Germany, one of our riggers was from Brazil and so on.

However, the chief animator who was doing almost all the motion for both Eve and the Creature was a 15 year old (at the time) from Baguio City. That's the surprise. When we were looking for talent I said to myself: "I don't care if they're from Iran. If they want to do this movie we will do this movie."

I only learned later where each of the members came from, and I was really surprised to learn the guy doing all our motion (and he also did the face rig for Eve) is actually from Baguio and was barely out of high-school.

The other thing was I had a plan... a very meticulous plan. We had this table that showed how each of the main Processes: Writing, Modeling, Rigging/Animating, Music/Sound, Visual Effects... How they would proceed all at the same time so that we could finish within 2 years even if in reality (because of jobs and school) we could only do this film at a rate of about 1 or 2 hours every week.

When it was all over, we did a bit of a de-briefing and the VFX artist from Australia said that in the end the real driver of this project was the notion that there was a Process... a Plan to "get to the end".

So in that way you are right. It does become a problem to get to the end. Especially because in our method we emphasized small-scale testing before full-on VFX implementation. This meant that by the time we were doing the glass shatters, explosions, gunfire.. it was already sort of "boring" because they knew already from the testing how to do it!

But we did set targets for ourselves. What kind of people we wanted to watch this movie. What we wanted to get out of it. And we simply moved "left to right" across that Process Table. When you get to the right most column of your schedule.. You're done!

P.S.:

I think the other thing we really pushed for was risk-control. We optimized many of the effects and we do quite a lot of old-fashioned "camera trickery" that is really from the 70's (for example the floor reflection at the beginning of the film isn't a true CG reflection - you can guess how we did it.... )

This was all designed to reduce the amount of render time because I was worried very early that waiting a long time for renders will make people tired or that it won't give us enough time to fix up shots. In the end, we had a per-core render time of roughly 2 minutes per Core. With VFX artists using Quad cores.. that meant about 30 seconds a frame.

It was heavily optimized. And many of the scenes you're seeing have been rendered 3, 4, or even 5 times. Each time to tweak it. To make it better.

Even at Pixar, Ed Catmull, in a lecture I watched on YT, explained that "all first renders look bad". So I figured if Pixar couldn't get it right the first time, then we have to be prepared to re-render 10 times if necessary (and this is even after we signed off on Pre-Production Testing).

So that was also important.. the confidence that we optimized the production enough so we can "take a hit" and not go down.

For people wondering how we did it, what I learned from the production, key highlights, lows, lessons, problems, solutions, inspirations.... We have a very special announcement for you guys.

Starting Monday, April 15, 2013, HERO, the most-watched anime channel on Philippine cable television, will be running a feature and interview about REVERSION.

The interview will be available online to global audiences the following week on HERO's Official Website.

P.S.: I actually pass by their office tomorrow to pick-up my DVD copy of the interview.
I honestly think they can't use everything - I used up two tapes in the session. hehehe.

congrats on your team's effort, good job ,

Thanks.  Did you see it on TV?