Twelve years ago, I was probably being competitive with my classmates in memorizing the multiplication table and asking my sister to print me out a guide on our ancient desktop computer: that Windows XP sound that sent me back to my childhood days filled with Pinball and having no idea how to play Solitaire.

Everything was (technologically) different in 2005—the year “Saving Sally” was just a mere idea.

Finally completed in 2016, various criticisms of the film, be it animation-wise or story-wise, suddenly started pouring in and Peejo Pilar, who played the eye-conic (get it?) comic book editor Toto Calasanz, could only say, “This thing was written 12 years ago.”

Peejo and lead visual artist Jether Amar showed the attendees of AsiaPOP Comicon an elaborate PowerPoint presentation that simplified the tedious process that “Saving Sally” had to go through just for it to survive until the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF).

The (now) titos explained that the “tiny, little film” started out as a passion project among friends; it was never meant to be played at a bigger stage in front of a much bigger—and expectant—
audience.

The art of improvisation

When director Avid Liongoren and writer Charlene Sawit-Esguerra thought about saving their film, they thought they had everything to make it happen. But apparently, “everything” literally meant everything, and they didn’t actually have it.

The studio where “Saving Sally” scenes were shot was far from the big animation studios that we see in behind the scenes sneak peeks of Pixar movies.

And after creating some prototypes that eventually didn’t work with what they wanted to happen, “Sally’s” crew succumbed to the difficulties of filmmaking and money shortage. “We tried some 3D animations. We realized something was wrong—we were not Pixar. We were not at par with the international standards of 3D,” Jether said.

The equipment used by Rocketsheep Studio to make “Saving Sally” come to life was exactly how you’d imagine 2005: desktops that overheated and electric fans that were used to cool down CPUs.

For the special effects needed by “Sally” to successfully do her chores using her inventions, the team wrapped their “Chroma Man” in a blue hoodie and he was ready to hang some laundry. Well, close to that.

Lessons learned

Believe it or not, the struggle of “Sally’s” team wasn’t just improvisation, prototypes and “disrespecting” the Chroma Man.

“We were very stupid,” was the sentence that Avid used to sum up the reasons behind the delay. They didn’t know anything about the film business and the gruelling process they had to go through; they basically winged it.

“We realized that creating the film itself was just half of it,” Avid told Super. “And accomplishing the other half was too difficult.”

As of this writing, Avid confessed that he still had no “favorite part” in “Sally’s” 12-year journey. “I haven’t left the film behind yet … There are so many things attached to a film besides the story, directing, acting. Those are the things that other people [outside the film] usually see,” he said.

And Avid owned up to the fact that if they knew it would take 12 years to actually make something they thought was going to be finished 10 years earlier, they wouldn’t have said yes.

But Avid’s grey hair was almost unnoticeable when “Sally” took home two awards in the MMFF—and now she doesn’t need a rocket to head to Taiwan for the Kaohsiung Film Festival this October!