Reasons Why Filipino Movies Have Bad CGI
Channel: Tisha Ramirez
Date: 2018-05-01

Computer-Generated Imagery, better known as CGI, is one of the key components of movie magic. Although Philippine movies and television series have come a long way since their “scratch-on-film” special effects days, even the most recent ones like Bagani still have a lot of room for improvement.

To be fair, the Philippine entertainment industry is trying its best to keep up with foreign competitors and their technology. Here are 4 of the real reasons why Filipino movies have bad CGI:

1. Filipino networks have budgets relatively smaller than other networks.

Why does Filipino CGI look bad? Top answer is “lack of funding”.

Bagani is currently the country’s most expensive TV series next to Encantadia, with almost 300 million PHP (6 million USD) spent on rights for the series up to 3 seasons. It’s reported that the entire first season had a budget of over 200 million PHP (4 million USD) or around 2 million PHP (40,000 USD) per episode.

However, HBO’s Game of Thrones has a budget of around 2.5 to 3 billion PHP (50 to 60 million USD), and each episode (except the pilot) costs approximately 400 million PHP (8 million USD)

2. CGI takes hours to make.

There are only a few networks in the Philippines and they have to put out a whole day worth of shows and segments daily. Some of these networks have a limited graphics team that also need to be around for other shows, so they won’t have time to focus on just generating images from the computer. For the sake of efficiency and time, they have to pre-make almost everything.

3. Networks haven’t invested on the technology.

4. CGI costs a lot of money.

In 2013 alone, every one of the most expensive movies either heavily featured CGI special effects or was entirely computer animation.