Celebrated BuyBust and On The Job director Erik Matti’s recent departure from upcoming superhero pic, Darna, hasn’t discouraged him from aspiring toward shepherding family adventure projects – particularly ones with stylish, visionary action. The latest indicator of this is now available with Yo!, a proof-of-concept trailer that easily likens itself to titles like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World which carries almost that exact same visual, energetic vibe.
Matti is unveiling the proof this weekend as one of several projects he and the gang at Reality Entertainment have under way – this, in association with Mothership Inc. Front and center is Tae Kwon Do wunderkind Pauline Lopez who Matti now eyes as the hopeful lead of this project, and he credits her among a number of highlights elucidated in his testimony on Saturday posted accordingly on his Facebook page. There’s no start date just yet, but long story short…a female-fronted martial arts family adventure about girl who battles evil with her fighting prowess and a badass yo-yo?
Just short of catching Sukeban Deka feels, I’m all for this!
The first time we did an all green screen film was in 2012 with Tiktik the Aswang Chronicles. We did 8 months on the post to devote on special effects. But we were still a bit ignorant then that the ambition of the film was far more than what we can achieve. Don’t get me wrong, we are proud of what we achieved in Tiktik. Tiktik marked Reality Entertainment’s return to movies after doing advertising for so many years. But there was a lot to improve on the monsters of Tiktik. And since then we’ve learned our lesson in Mothership Inc and beefed up on our art direction, quality control and updates on current softwares abroad that could smoothen our workflow and make magic on the computer.
This is Yo! Our second attempt at an all green screen hyperreal fantasy movie that makes use of our favorite classic Pinoy toy, the yoyo. With Tiktik we brought back the almost forgotten folk lore of the aswangs to the present generation. Yo! brings this old fashioned childhood toy of ours to the 21st century vdeogame generation.
2 years back after Honor Thy Father, I mindlessly exclaimed in one drunken night that I want to start doing family movies. And I wasn’t drunk enough not to remember it since both me and my partner Dondon Monteverde have always loved children family movies. Right now we have probably 4 on our pipeline including Yo! that are all geared towards epic fantasy family entertainment. This is just one of them.
Here’s a proof of concept on the kind of film we want for this. A film set in its own world with its own kind of pop jargon set in urban manila with some hyper real settings. Please note that they will not be in cyberspace but they will be in their own animated graphic world when they focus on their best friend the yoyo.
We shot this on a studio for a day and a half (meaning a day shoot that extended for another half day) on all green screen. We employed the help of expert yoyo-ers (yes, there’s a subculture of those like the rappers) and taught this fresh new talent we discovered Pauline Lopez, the top taekwondo champion in South East Asia right now, how to do the moves (and the rest is movie computer generated magic). And she’s Filipina too!
And as one friend said, this is our ode to hypeculture. Go see it guys! And share all you want!
– Erik Matti, Director, YO!