The Story
BUDOTS MEDIA was born in 2014, in the rehabilitation period after Typhoon Haiyan tore through Cebu Province. Bart Sakwerda, with a background in media production and an eye on the country's exploding appetite for video, opened a small production shop — first in Budlaan, then Banilad.
In 2015 the office moved to Maribago, Lapu-Lapu City, the island home it has kept ever since. From 2016 to 2020 the company also ran BUDOTS MEDIA LONDON from Hackney and Camden High Street, serving European clients while the Cebu team served Asia.
Then came 2020. While much of the industry shut down, Budots Media expanded — setting up a full production house in Lapu-Lapu City in the middle of the pandemic. The bet paid off: when borders reopened, the team was already delivering for the Philippines Department of Tourism, DOT Region 7 (FMA7 Filipino Martial Arts, RIDE7 motorsports, DIVE7 scuba), BYD, JPARK Island Resort and NUSTAR.
Every crisis in our history became an expansion: Haiyan gave us a reason to exist, COVID gave us a production house, and ChatGPT gave us a new industry.
The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT marked the third turn. Budots Media moved beyond video production into AI — with the development of a sovereign Filipino language model and a multimodal generative model as its stated priority. Growth markets: Arabia, India and Southeast Asia, backed by access to European Structural Funds through BUDOTS MEDIA POLAND and a presence in London.
The team works in eight languages — English, Cebuano, Tagalog, Japanese, Polish, Chinese, Thai and Arabic — and in every medium: film, drones, photogrammetry, maps, graphs, animation and games.
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