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Mar 27, 2023 · 8 min reads. "The Voice in the Hollow" is a stunning short film created by Director and VFX Supervisor Miguel Ortega and his partner, artist Tran Ma (collectively known as Half M.T Studios). Spoken entirely in Swahili, the film tells the story of Coa and Ala, two sisters who discover an ancient evil entity in the "hollow" of an African savannah.
Director and VFX supervisor Miguel Ortega and writer and production designer Tran Ma came up with the idea for The Voice in the Hollow while filming scenes on their previous project, The Ningyo, deep inside a cavern in Northern California known as “the moaning cave.” “When we were down there shooting, they actually said, don’t shoot over there b...
- Unreal Engine
May 16, 2023 · Director Miguel Ortega explains how Unreal Engine 5 enabled the creation of the animated fable, The Voice in the Hollow. Jump To: Storyboarding in Unreal Engine 5. Using Unreal Engine 5 for easy edits. You'd be forgiven for thinking Unreal Engine 5 is just for video games, after all that's how creator Epic Games made its name.
- Origins
- Plot
- Visual References
- Character Design
- Environment Design
- Voice Acting
- Motion Capture
- Lighting and Rendering
- Finishing Touches
- Pulling Off An Impossible Production with Real-Time Film-Making
Ortega and Ma began work on The Voice in the Hollow at a difficult time in their professional lives: the movie adaptation of The Ningyo, a project in which the pair had invested years of work, fell apart as productions were suspended during the initial COVID-19 restrictions. “You think you’re days away from a life-changing moment, then you’re told ...
A key inspiration for The Voice in the Hollow was California’s Moaning Caverns, where Ortega and Ma had shot scenes from The Ningyo, and the site of some of the oldest human remains to be discovered in North America. Before the caverns became a tourist attraction and the entrance was widened, air flowing through the caves created a moaning sound, l...
If the setting for The Voice in the Hollow is African, the look is definitely Western, in more than one sense. Visual references for the film included The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci’s bleak 1968 Spaghetti Western, along with grindhouse horror movies and brutal 1975 crime drama Framed. “There’s something about 70s movies,” says Ortega. “People l...
The designs of the characters in The Voice in the Hollow draw inspiration from traditional African hairstyles and body painting, although not from any individual culture or ethnic group. Ala and Coa are distinguished to the audience through the colour of their face paint, and through their clothing. Ala, the successful hunter, has a freer and more ...
Although the sisters’ village is only seen in a small number of shots, it was created as a complete 360-degree set, to provide maximum flexibility when choosing camera angles. To speed up the process, Ortega and Ma adopted a modular approach, generating variant designs for the huts using Maya’s XGeninstancing toolset. The base elements for the buil...
Although the script was originally written in English, Ortega and Ma quickly decided to switch to Swahili for the final recordings, as one of the languages most commonly spoken in East Africa. Unable to find Swahili-speaking actors in Los Angeles, or suitable African talent agencies, the pair hit on the novel idea of hiring audiobook translators – ...
Motion capture for the short was recorded on the greenscreen stage at Gnomon’s Hollywood campus, using a Xsens MVN Awindasuit. Ortega recorded placeholder animations for Coa and Ala himself, but “it was obvious that it was a 40-year-old dude trying to move his hips around like a teenage girl”, so for the final sessions, the duo turned to Kaitlyn O’...
The short was lit and rendered in Unreal Engine, using an early-access version of Unreal Engine 5.0, with Ortega and Ma placing light blockers inside the Unreal Engine level to control the position of shadows. To provide more control over the look of the final output, the duo rendered the raw lighting effects and passes and composited them inside U...
The characters’ clothing was created in Marvelous Designer, with the cloth simulations imported into Unreal Engine as Alembic caches. Other effects, like blood and dirt, were created in Houdini. The score for the movie was created by Ortega and Ma’s friend and regular collaborator Dan Dombrowsky, while the 2D animation used for Coa’s vision sequenc...
Although 15 visual artists are credited on The Voice in the Hollow, the bulk of the work was done by Ortega and Ma themselves, who worked on the project “more than full-time” for a year. “We worked on [The Voice in the Hollow] from sleeping to waking, seven days a week,” says Ortega. “We didn’t have one day off. The only time we weren’t working on ...
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Miguel René Ortega Rodríguez ( Puebla de Zaragoza, México; 13 de abril de 1995) es un futbolista mexicano que juega como guardameta en los Tigres de la UANL de la Liga MX. Trayectoria. Inicios. Se inició en la cantera del Club Universidad Nacional.
Apr 13, 1995 · Name in home country: Miguel René Ortega Rodríguez Date of birth/Age: Apr 13, 1995 (29) Place of birth: Puebla de Zaragoza Height: 1,93 m Citizenship: Mexico Position: Goalkeeper Foot: right Player agent: Fetama Sports ... Current club: Tigres UANL Joined: Jul 1, 2018 Contract expires: - Social-Media:
