Brief Explanation

“Samahang Matibay” means “friendship that endures.” It is the story of a boy, Anton, who grows up with his family of Standard Appliances. As he gets older and through the years, the almost magical bond between him and his appliances grows only stronger. The story begins with a Filipino family starting a life in their new home. Settling in, they unpack their things including three special appliances: the electric fan Ben Tilador from “bentilador,” which is electric fan in Filipino, the rice cooker Manay B (Mrs. B) with “B” for “bahaw,” the Filipino for rice used for cooking fried rice, and the gas stove Manong Burnie (Mr. Burnie). Since Anton was a baby, the trio of appliances has been his friends. As time passed, we go through the special moments of their friendship. Until one day, Anton is all grown up with a job. One would think that independent Anton would forget his old friends, but using his first paycheck, he bought a new addition to his family, a Standard Appliance blender. For though years have passed, the friendship he had with his Standard Appliances endures. The story ends with a picture of Anton, his parents, the appliances.

Creative Execution

Upon discussing the details of the story we generated 3d rendered animated images with a lean team of 8 in-house artists who have recently come home to the Philippines to work on projects closer to their roots. They used techniques and processes rarely used locally, a combination of hand animation and Kinect captured point cloud animation for rotoscoping motion. A couple of tools were also developed to help speed up and automate the rendering process of generating. Global Illumination for static environments and moving and/or dynamic geometries. The colors and lighting on each shot were set to make the result of the render appear as close as possible to the final desired look. Compositing post work laid out the final touches of adding subtle nuances like depth of field, vector motion blur and light wraps among others. Every frame that was rendered in this film was a result of technical expertise as well as a downpour of childhood memories and textures from the hung “Big Wooden Utensils” in the kitchen to the small trinkets placed on the table in the living room. Even the characters developed for the film were reminiscent of childhood memories most of the team had grown up with them without ever realizing how they've become part of their life, and family.