After almost 3 years of hard work and plenty of sleepless nights, GENG is officially finished. We received the A Print Master Copy from Kantana Bangkok last week and it is the final of the finals version. 35mm with Dolby Sound Surround. We did almost all of the work here. We only sent it to Bangkok for film reel transfer and audio final mixing for Dolby, so it’s more on the technical side. Tomorrow (13th January 2009) will be the big day for all of us: The Geng Press Preview Screening. It’s going to be the first time we are going to watch GENG on the big screen. Everyone is extremely excited about it. I bet there will be tears falling down tomorrow. Yeah deny it all you can guys. I’m super sure about it.
I had a few discussions with the directors and pioneers of Les Copaque. We all agree and admit that it seems like a very huge and an impossible project in the beginning. We started with only 3 people, dreaming and planning to produce Malaysia’s 1st 3D animated feature film. We knew it was going to be a tough road because of limited knowledge, experience, manpower and most importanly, funding. I still remember when Uncle and Auntie asked us if we can finish up the movie. And what did we say? Of course can lah! At that time we had only 7 people. I’m not really sure what we were thinking at that time but this was how we planned the timeline.Resources = 7 manpower
Animation timeline = 12 months
Total film duration = 80 - 90 minutes
84 minutes divide by 12 months = 7 minutes per month
7 mins per month with 7 ppl = 1 min per month per animator
1 animator = 3 seconds per day
It does seem logic! UNTIL…. we thought about rendering, compositing, audio recording, sound design, voice casting, editing, marketing, data storage, film transfer, sound mixing, etc. YES it seems absolutely ridiculous now but that was and still is the spirit of the team. We had nothing but we kept on believing.
We knew we had to design the pipeline ourselves. We couldn’t follow the Hollywood pipeline which requires a huge number of people and HUGE amounts of money of course. We also couldn’t follow any pipeline in Malaysia because there was none at that time. The challenge was not making a beautiful 2 minutes 3D commercial or a 1 minute fly-through animation architecture. We’re talking about a 80 - 90 minutes 35mm full feature film, 1080HD in resolution with surround sound.On top of the technical challenges, we also needed a very strong storyline with appealing characters. In 2007 we decided to test our storyline and characters. We took out Upin & Ipin and created a mini series based on the twins. To our surprise, it was a huge success. It boosted our confidence in storytelling and overall character design. However the success of Upin & Ipin series created a small “problem”. The twins were originally minors in GENG but after receiving good response from the audience, we had to rewrite the storyline to meet the audience expectations.
It was not the first time we had to rewrite the story. The GENG storyline was continuously changing until the very end of the production. We kept reviewing the storyline again and again. There was one time that we had the animation progress at around 50 minutes when we decided to do a major change in the storyline. We rejected the animation and rewrote the script. By the end of the production, we had animated more than 130 minutes with a few number of script versions.
GENG is a huge project with lots and lots of challenges and that’s what makes it very interesting. Now it is finished, we can only pray that GENG will be a huge success and has a significant impact to the industry. A post in this blog will not be sufficient to tell everything about GENG. I doubt even a book will be sufficient. It stays in our memories. End.p/s Syukur to Allah. Thank you to my family, my dearest wife and son. Thank you Uncle and Auntie for believing in us. Without the opportunity we will be nothing. Congratulations and thank you to the team. Thank you for believing in this project. Let us continue our effort! Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much. And thank you to all supporters. Have faith!
-Nizam
