Trending Culture or Avoiding Innovation? And The Role of CGI in The Philippine Cinema
With the growing number of films produced each year, a growing number of people ask the question “What’s new?” Comedy, Romance, Horror, and Drama are the most dominating genres in the Philippine screens and Filipino audience loves them. Hence, is the Philippines avoiding some sort of other genres, or is it just because they want to stick on the unending trend of the types of films in their cinema?
What makes CGI come to this topic? Perhaps, because of the genres that cover the use of CGI. These genres include science fiction, fantasy, or sometimes action. With the knowledge about the Philippines’ main genres and the genres that involve CGI, one conclusion can be made: The Philippine cinema avoids CGI. One could say that the conclusion is an absurd one. However, this is true with observation. But why?
Ironically, the Philippine cinema avoids CGI yet it is attempting to make films with CGI. Although Rom-Com, Horror, and Drama dominate the theatres, movies with CGI are still produced to ‘try’ achieving visual effects success. These movies include superhero comedy movies and comedy fantasies. One example is the 2016 film Enteng Kabisote 10 and the Abangers which is a comedy fantasy film featuring heroic adventures of the protagonist, Enteng Kabosite. The film did have a better CGI than its previous 2012 movie.
This is evidence that there’s an improvement in each attempt in movies. So, could this mean that this move serves as an ‘experiment’ for finding errors in the industry, to improve the Filipino CGI? Hopefully, yes but the progress could be so little without the proper way of identifying the problem. Maybe this is the key to opening the doors of film success.
Once errors are found, the industry might try fixing problems involving time, efficiency, budget, and manpower. You can check my story “What Makes Filipino CGI Bad?” to know more about the problems in Filipino CGI and its possible solutions.
We can see that there are many attempts to learn and improve CGI for better films. However, if these movies are not the ‘attempts’ to learn better CGI, then maybe the industry has no plans to take a step for film innovation. This could mean that CGI incapability won’t be a problem for the Philippine cinema. CGI would just become an “optional” thing for the industry, which then limits us only to the film genres that we know.
The society might perceive the presence and absence of CGI in films as nothing. If people would like to watch good science fiction and fantasy films, they would probably search for international content as the only available source. The bad ending is, the Philippines might be locked out inside a continuous system where the only genres available are Romance, Comedy, Drama, and Horror — no Science Fiction, no epic Fantasy, no CGI.
The absence of CGI in films could indicate that the trends and cultures are the ones shaping the Philippine film industry. Because Filipinos are born in a country of limited movie genres, as they grow up, it may become part of their lives. Even with CGI in the industry, it is still a no big deal for people who grew up watching Romance because science fiction may not hook their interests. And after all, the majority of the audiences would probably prefer watching the “cultural genres” — Comedy, Romance, Horror, and Drama. CGI might be useless at all.
Finally, this leads us to the conclusion that the Philippine film industry could be avoiding the production of other film genres because (1) most of the audience prefers to watch the standard genres in the country; and (2) CGI is not yet achieved nor successful. The Philippine cinema can make great content in their ‘standard’ genres, but they would just become an audience of many good international sci-fi or fantasy film producers.
