Tiktik: Pinoy answer to Avatar

No, Tiktik is not about sex crimes from police files sensationalized by a magazine of that name many years ago.

Produced by Reality Entertainment with Dingdong Dantes’ AgostoDos Pictures and GMA Films, Tiktik The Aswang Chronicles is a fantasy-adventure done in the smash-hit fashion of James Cameron’s Avatar, the first-ever Filipino film shot against Green Screen in a 2,000-square-meter studio in 18 months to the tune of…P80M?

Ask Dondon Monteverde, the producer, and Erik Matti, the director, and they will tell you that making this kind of movie is, indeed, very expensive.

“But it’s worth it,” they said.

Over lunch, Dondon and Erik showed Funfare how the whole thing was done. Having also watched rough cuts of Avatar in Sydney in 2009 (after an interview with its star, Sam Worthington, a relative “unknown” when he co-starred in The Great Raid with Cesar Montano who played a bigger role), I was impressed by the technology behind Tiktik. It’s virtual reality and it doesn’t at all make you feel that what you’re watching are just special effects. The roads, the trees, the clouds and the creatures, all created using the latest in computer technology, are very real. Very Avatar, I told Dondon and Erik. Very magical. Words are not enough to capture the magnitude of the movie. You just have to watch it to be overwhelmed by it.

“We’ve been toying with the idea for six years,” added Dondon who, with Erik, put up Reality Entertainment in 2003, whose debut project was the horror flick Pa-Siyam in 2004, then it co-produced Exodus, an entry in the 2005 Metro Filmfest. “We then thought of establishing a name in the advertising industry so we put up Revolver Studios with US-trained A/F Benaza as partner.” In the 2011 Araw Awards at the Advertising Congress, Revolver was named Production of the Year.

“But once a moviemaker, always a moviemaker,” said Erik.

Top: The 2,000-square-meter studio where the movie was shot against Green Screen. Above: A ‘virtual reality’ scene from the movie. Right: Tiktik director Erik Matti (left) and producer Dondon Monteverde, with (far right) US trained director A/F Benaza as partner.

So they put up PostManila, a post-production outfit, and, later, Mothership, a computer graphics company with internationally trained visual effects supervisor Dave Yu as head of the team.

All four companies  Reality, Revolver, PostManila and Mothership  worked together to come up with Tiktik which, with its Avatar-style technology, could revolutionize the making of action-adventure-fantasy films.

Starring Dingdong himself with Lovi Poe, Joey Marquez and Janice de Belen, Tiktik will perhaps thrill moviegoers more with its “green-screened” action scenes than with its story around a kind of witch known in the Visayan Region. It opens nationwide on Oct. 17.

Already, those (this one included) who have seen the rushes are comparing it, besides Avatar, to 300 and Sin City and other Hollywood films shot against Green Screen.

But Dondon refused to be swayed by the superlatives just yet.

“We are not saying that we are at par with Hollywood standards, malayo pa tayo, but with Tiktik we are taking an ambitious step forward.”

To paraphrase Neil Amstrong when he landed on the moon, one small step for a producer, one giant leap for the Philippines Movie Industry.

It starts with a dream…

(E-mail reactions at [email protected]. You may also send your questions to [email protected]. For more updates, photos and videos visit www.philstar.com/funfare or follow me on www.twitter/therealrickylo.)