The Voice in the Hollow was a reaction both to this experience – a desire to make a film for its own sake, without worrying about its commercial viability – and to that of life during lockdown. “It’s like a lottery ticket has been snatched out of your hands.” “You think you’re days away from a life-changing moment, then you’re told the project is completely dead,” says Ortega. 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. The production was documented in a series of weekly livestreams, archived on Gnomon’s YouTube channel. The Voice in the Hollow’s premiere at Gnomon, the international CG school that produced the short. In this article, we explore how The Voice in the Hollow came to be created, how real-time film-making enabled its tiny production team to complete what would have otherwise have been an impossible project – and how, in a final twist in this already twisted tale, a film that Ortega and Ma regarded as deliberately, defiantly uncommercial is now winning major awards at festivals and praise from Epic Games itself. Whereas Ortega and Ma’s previous productions were created using a conventional offline effects pipeline, The Voice in the Hollow, created over the course of a year of intense, obsessive work, exploits the new workflows made possible by Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games’ game engine and real-time renderer. It’s also a new departure for the professional and personal partnership of Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma, the duo of visual effects artists best known for The Ningyo, their ambitious episode-length 2017 live-action short about a turn-of-the-twentieth-century cryptozoologist on the hunt for a mythical Japanese mermaid. A 3D animation styled like a 1970s grindhouse movie, it transplants the biblical story of Cain and Abel to East Africa, recasting the protagonists as teenage girls, and retelling their bloody tale of sibling jealousy and murder in Swahili. The Voice in the Hollow isn’t your average animated short.
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