A Conversation with the People Behind 'Mahal'

The newest instalment from Meta’s Reimagined series is Mahal: a VR-animated story based on Filipino mythology. The story revolves around four sibling deities, Apolaki, Mayari, Tala and Hanan, and how they are trying to navigate the world together after the death of their father, Bathala. A story about grief, familial responsibility and growing into yourself, Mahal is a modern love letter to the Philippines and its folklore. 

Having just premiered Mahal at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, creator and director, Michaela Ternasky-Holland, and her voice cast reunite in my virtual waiting room. Still reeling from the strong start of Mahal’s festival run, they reminisce about the days spent in their separate recording booths when their VR stage was nothing more than a storyboard and a blank horizon missing a few sparkles. 

The director, cast and crew at the Tribeca premiere (Courtesy of Reimagined)

Curious about their experience during Tribeca, the cast each share how they perceived the project’s recognition this past week.

Loreto Delgado (voice of Apolaki): I had the time of my life. It was an honour to share Michaela’s story and it was really fulfilling as a Filipino American in this industry: we finally have a platform to say, “Hey here’s our history, here’s our culture and we hope you like it.” 

Eileen Descallar (voice of Catalonan): I felt like everything about this was very community-based and heritage-based, and then to have it at this big festival that everyone knows not just like in our community (the voiceover community) just blew me away.

Anne Yatco (voice of Hanan): To be a part of something made for the next generation is so cool. I was excited for it to be just one more thing for people to hold onto and I think that’s really special.

Lee Sy (voice of Tala): I never thought that I would get an invitation to Tribeca in my lifetime. That is not something that happens to people who are based here, that’s quite rare. It’s a once-in-a-blue-moon that someone from the Philippines, you know, makes it big out there.

Daphne Nitsuga (voice of Mayari): It was just really awesome to see people arrive to see Filipino excellence at such a big event.

Michaela Ternasky-Holland (director, writer and producer): About 6 months ago I told the crew that my dream was for this to premiere at Tribeca. I was so excited to be able to share that dream with not just the cast, but also the crew, and be able to see that dream come true. So yeah, it was definitely a full-circle moment for me.

A vertical of Mahal’s scenery (Courtesy of Reimagined)

Having worked on the first volume of the Reimagined series, Michaela shares how she formulated the idea behind Mahal and what she wanted to portray in this ambitious re-telling of a Filipino story of creation.

MTH: Being a queer woman, I remember telling my family I was in a relationship with a woman a few years ago and the conservatism in my family got me really thinking like, what is being a Filipino like? What does that mean? Christianity and Catholicism don’t come from the Philippines like natively right? And then I got into a deeper spiral of like, the Philippines isn’t even like an actual country, it was colonised to become the Philippines. It’s literally named after King Philip. Who were we before we were colonised? What is my actual ancestral knowledge and heritage? I soon found Filipino mythology.

I was really attracted to this Tagalog story about the creator, Bathala and his children. I just felt really connected to them because I loved Greek and Roman mythology growing up and this felt like the most accessible form of mythology to me. I felt like I could understand it and it's not so based on naturalism and spiritualism and the notion that gods are in the trees or in the ocean so, I always had that floating in the back of my brain.

After working with my co-creator, Julie Cavalier on the Reimagined series, it was decided that I would be the director for Volume 2. The Reimagined series is all about reimagining folktale fairy tales and mythology and I was like great. I’m going to do this story about Bathala and his children.

When I was younger, my father died in a car accident and I knew I always wanted to explore my grief in that. I always knew I wanted to do a project that was in honour of him or dedicated to him and now, Mahal is now in honour of my grandparents, my mother, their heritage and culture but also, as a mixed race person, it is also in full honour and dedicated to my father. So, that’s really where all the beginning seeds of Mahal sprouted from. 

As Mahal is exclusively viewed using a VR headset, I was curious to understand why Michaela had chosen this medium to portray her story with.

MTH: There are people who are tearing down the castle walls of inclusivity and diversity in the mainstream media in film and video games and podcasting and all these different forms of media that have existed in our lifetime. Well, why don’t I just let those people tear down those castle walls and then I’ll go build my own little weird home over here in VR land/AI land? Instead of having to fight for ourselves to be seen, why don’t I just set the precedent that this is just how this industry is gonna go? Let’s hire Filipinos to be Filipinos and actually tell this story as told by a queer female director. VR is already groundbreaking in itself so let’s use its ability to tap into digital realities, get into merging technologies and tell a really important story using this medium.

LD: Michaela knows this medium so well. She’s been in this industry so much longer than any of us and even amongst her peers at Tribeca. To answer your questions about, “Why VR? Why not 2D and why was it recorded in 360?” I think the way this piece really innovates camera movement and really immerses you in the film, really, is a milestone for VR in general. I want to shout out to Michaela for taking that next step in the history of VR storytelling.

MTH: The scale of the deities, the scale of the world, the feeling of moving through literal realms, the feeling of always being surrounded by these gorgeous landscapes, the choreography of the characters, the choreography of the camera… My hope is that people will watch and be like, “I’m so glad I saw it in VR because even if I saw it in 2D, it wouldn’t have been the same.” That’s the kind of textual quality of what you want the audience to feel like.

Once we were in VR and working in Quill, which is the hand-painted animation platform, every single piece of detail you see in this project has been handpainted or hand-animated by somebody using a VR headset. Everything is native to VR. My team and I weren’t on a computer being like, “This might work in VR”. We were literally in VR editing everything in real-time. Even as the creation process happened, the only part that was 2D was the concept. Once we were done with concept art, we were directly into storyboarding in VR.

The piece of the puzzle that was the most challenging is always just the amount of memory and poly count being used. Because I was working with some of the best artists, they were making the best environments, characters and effects with the lightest amount of draw calls and poly so I never felt like I had to sacrifice my creative vision. They would get mad at me sometimes though like, “Michaela, you’re going to break Quill” and I was like, “I know but I just want like three more sparkles right there and I know you know how to do it.”

Other than that, I really feel like my creative vision never had to be sacrificed for technical issues and on top of that, I never felt like my crew had to sacrifice their personal health and wellbeing to work on this project either and that’s really special for me too.

Action figures at Tribeca Film Festival (Courtesy of Reimagined)

Seeing how much work, love and dedication were put into the construction of Mahal’s world, I turned to the voice cast to explore how they brought this world to life through their characters, and the connections they made with the roles they played.

DN: I actually feel connected to Mayari. She’s an older sister figure and I’m an older sister. She has this thing where she expresses her grief and anger and I really related to that because the only time I ever get angry is when I don’t want to. I guess that’s why I really enjoy playing her so much because she’s very close to me as a person and how I express my feelings.

LD: In contrast, I felt the farthest away from my character and that’s because I’m the youngest of four and my siblings are also much farther apart in age. I felt like an only child most of the type versus Apolaki who is the oldest and has to address his siblings in a much different way than I address my siblings where even now, they still see me as this little baby. 

In terms of relationships and feeling empathy, I actually empathize more with Hanan because growing up conservative, my family is very protective over me so I didn’t have a lot of freedom. Hanan is the same in that she has to be okay with everything happening around her. She’s the youngest and she kind of just has to take it and just be happy and try her best. I really felt that growing up.

AY: I feel like I identify with something from each of the characters but what I will say is that Hanan is what I want to be. She has this childlike wisdom to accept that terrible things are happening but we have to keep moving forward. We can’t be stuck in the past and we can’t be angry. We can’t try to forget and we can’t do anything else besides accept it and those are all the things I do. Hanan’s base response is to accept and to move forward and she has that personality of wanting to gather everyone and that’s who I want to be. 

ED: I think it’s part of the wonderful script that includes all these different characters embodying a little bit of everybody. I think everyone can recognize themselves in every character in this and even in the narrator.

MTH: They [the characters] all symbolize different forms of my grief that I had growing up and they also represent different people I want to be. In terms of grief, Hanan was the one who was people-pleasing and forgetting herself, doubting her own power as well. Mayari was struggling with her abandonment which then forms into anger and resentment and ultimately her creative isolation in her work. Apalaki stood for the figurehead of the family and wanting to keep everything normal and okay for everyone in his family.

Knowing that the cast has had varying levels of familiarity within the voiceover community, I asked if there were any unforeseen challenges that came up during the process of creating this project and how they each conquered these difficulties. 

DN: There’s a lot of honesty and a lot that is getting expressed when you’re a voice actor. We all have a microphone, right? But we don’t have our face. We don’t have our body. So, for example, when you’re required to cry. When I normally cry, I am a silent crier unless I’m sobbing or ugly crying haha. So although the script says “cry”, there’s no camera on me and no one can see what’s happening so I have to figure out how to show the audience that I’m sad.

LD:  This was a really cool experience for me. It was an entirely new medium and I was very thankful to have had a coach walk me through this script and help me realize how I can communicate in this medium.

The biggest thing that caught me off-guard was the effort because, how often in life are you conscientious of what you do? Take Daphne’s example of crying. When I normally cry I’d be all these things but in the booth, I’d always get feedback like, “That all sounds great but it sounds like you’re coughing.” It’s been a really fun challenge and now I’m hooked and I hope to get to do more. 

LS: I’ve been doing voiceover for a while but it’s always been commercials and manipulating people into buying things they don’t need haha. So it’s never been honest ever and I very rarely get called for something emotional and honest and the only other kind of animation jobs that I’ve had were games and things that were quite high-energy like funny little voices and such. There was never anything quite like this. This was something that only required me to be honest and to kind of lay myself in there.

With Tala, I had to emote in a way where I was holding back a little bit. I had to pull back my tears through my voice, without a camera, and I was always questioning how to convey that through voice acting. That was kind of a big challenge for me and trying to get in the zone of this character. However, I’m grateful for the opportunity and it was a fun challenge to see how I push myself in that department. I’m a part of something to be really proud of.

Mahal’s Tribeca poster (Courtesy of Reimagined)

Now nearing the end of our conversation and learning about the inner workings behind Mahal, I wanted to know where everyone saw the impact of this project 5 years in the future and if their collective dream has grown into something more since their debut at Tribeca.

MTH: The impact of this project, I think, is really getting people in the headset right now because it’s the only way that I want people to watch it. The 2D render is sort of like an “only if they have to” so, I really see the impact continuing through the festival run. We are going to the Asian-Americxan International Film Festival in New York at the end of July but ultimately, I would love to get this to the Philippines. This project wasn’t made for white people necessarily but I think it’s important that they see us as these dope empowered folks. 

The dream would also be to raise a little more funding specifically for the VR project to curate and optimize it in different languages and localize it into different ways where people can access it in a deeper way. 

This project was also my way of saying, “Yes, anything is possible and you don’t have to think of yourself as a small person or a small creative. You can be a god or goddess in VR and you have unlimited power in this medium.” 

DN: When I think of Mahal, I think of how cool it is and how we all get to play deities and we are all the main characters but most importantly, we’re all Filipinos. I just hope it’s a platform for other Filipinos and Southeast Asians to just feel like there is somebody like them out there on a big platform like this. 

Growing up in a predominantly white neighbourhood, it wasn’t really cool to be Asian, it wasn’t really cool to be a minority. This is our chance to be cool. Koreans have K-Pop and things like that and now we Filipinos have Mahal. So I hope people see it and just feel cool and proud of all this.

ED: 5 years from now I hope to see more Filipino content but also Southeast Asian content in general. I would like to see more momentum and I think VR is a great space for representation. Like Michaela said, it’s spotlighting our history from a pre-colonial perspective which is just different from all representation we’ve had in the past. I love that and I’d love to see more of that in 5 years. 

AY: This is about a creation myth and I think everybody’s got something like that in their culture. If not that, Mahal also deals with the universal theme of grief and I think, even if you’re not Filipino, that still resonates with an audience and I hope more people get to see it and resonate with it. 

LS: I believe VR is here to stay and it’d just be nice that when the time comes that VR is commonplace and it’s in every household, there is already just something with Filipino people in it by Filipinos. I don’t think in other forms of media, there has ever been a situation like this. We, as Asians, have always arrived in mediums later but in this new space, we’re already there. 

MTH: This project wasn’t meant for prestigiousness and morals, it was meant for the community and the goal has always been to get it to the community.

Mahal is currently exclusive to view for festivals only at this time but will be released for free on Meta Quest headsets later this year.

Special thanks to: Alex Chester-Iwata, Michaela Ternasky-Holland, Loreto Delgado, Daphne Nitsuga, Anne Yatco, Eileen Descallar and Lee Sy for your contribution to this interview.