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● Cebu · Lapu-Lapu · since 2014

Philippines
& Budots Media

A media house founded in Cebu in the rebuild after Typhoon Haiyan, a travel company, tourism chatbots in three languages, a decade of maps and civic data, and machine learning for whale sharks.

Read the story ↓ 3D captures Sources
A decade on Mactan Island

Bart Sakwerda arrived in the Visayas during the emergency response to Typhoon Haiyan and stayed. What started as volunteer survey work became a media company, then a travel company, a set of public datasets and maps, and an early experiment in machine learning for marine wildlife.

This page tells that story in order: the founding of Budots Media, its productions, the chatbots built for Cebu's tourism trade, the vision behind the Philippines Travel Company, the maps and civic data, two typhoons, and the whale sharks of Oslob. Every factual claim is linked to a numbered source at the bottom of the page.

Contents
  1. Born in the rebuild
  2. Productions
  3. Study: media as a waveform
  4. Chatbots for Cebu
  5. Philippines Travel Company
  6. Maps & civic data
  7. Two typhoons
  8. Whale sharks of Oslob
  9. Lapu-Lapu at 500
  10. Captures in 3D
  11. Sources

Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, made landfall in the central Philippines in November 2013. It was one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded at landfall.29

Bart has written that his first contact with drones came during the emergency response that followed.2 He describes taking part in surveys for the UN-coordinated livelihood, WASH and food clusters, and watching helicopter survey flights by the US Marines, the Philippine Air Force and a Swiss private company. In his words, those flights were “a Godsend for local government and military who had no resources at a disposal”. He also notes that no commercial drones were in the air at the time, and that affected areas went without electricity for more than three months.2

Around May 2014 he flew a drone for the first time: a Parrot with a 720p camera, brought to Bantayan Island by a volunteer, a PhD student from the Czech Republic. One of his photos from that period shows the Bantayan Island airfield with the crew of a Philippine Air Force Huey from the 208th Tactical Helicopter Squadron.2

Witnessed specialists from around the world uniting efforts around maps, sharing data, producing reports.Bart Sakwerda, “Events that contributed most to interest in Aerial Surveying”, 20242

The experience shaped everything that followed. He began collecting maps and curated data on demographics, terrain, weather and old cartography, a habit that runs through all of the later work.2 His Behance portfolio still carries a project from that year, “2014 work during reconstruction after typhoon Yolanda”, alongside an identity and app concept for Bantayan Island covering disaster, livelihoods and tourism.21,20

Why a media company

When the relief work wound down, the question became how to make a living in Cebu. He explains the reasoning plainly:

The most logical step for me was to establish a media company, as it would capitalize on the rapidly growing online population and the local population’s desire for media consumption.Bart Sakwerda, 20242

Budots Media was founded in 2014, during the rehabilitation period after Haiyan.1 Its first office was in Budlaan and then Banilad, in Cebu City. In 2015 it moved across the channel to Maribago, in Lapu-Lapu City on Mactan Island, which is where Bart dates the company in some of his own posts.1,6 From 2016 to 2020 the studio also ran offices on Hackney and Camden High Street in London. Since 2023 it has worked with clients in Saudi Arabia.1

The studio describes itself today as a production house for multimedia and original IP. Its company page names a 2024 focus on games production.1

Studio locations
  1. 2014

    Budlaan → Banilad, Cebu City

    First office, during the post-Haiyan reconstruction.

  2. 2015

    Maribago, Lapu-Lapu City

    Mactan Island, across the channel from Cebu City.

  3. 2016 – 2020

    Hackney & Camden High Street, London

    London offices running alongside Cebu.

  4. 2023 →

    Saudi Arabia

    Work with Saudi clients begins.

What the studio offers
  • Video production, 360° and VR capture3
  • Drone photography and videography for resorts, hotels, real estate and events across Cebu6
  • 3D scanning: photogrammetry and gaussian splats1
  • Virtual tours and event coverage for MICE organisers and venues12
  • Chatbots and customer-service automation3
02 — Productions

Cameras, headsets & drones

Four strands of Budots Media's work: immersive video, aerial and FPV flying, regional promotion brands, and the national tourism mark.

360° video and a VR music video

Years
2016 – 2017
Formats
360°, VR, short-form social
Artist
Madeleine Wood

Bart writes that from 2016, under the Budots Media brand, he was “pioneering the use of 360 cameras, capturing and creating immersive experiences to promote tourism and real estate in the Philippines.”3

From February 2017 the studio produced nine short videos promoting original tracks featuring the Australian vocalist Madeleine Wood. The brief was to film, edit and publish each video on the same day, with minimal time and budget. Each had to run under two minutes and work both as 16:9 HD and as a 1080×1080 Instagram square.4 The series included a 360° VR music video for “Love Machine”.28 Bart also built a browsable interface for 360 VR websites on top of the open-source Marzipano viewer, using an equirectangular grid as the navigation.5

Aerial and FPV for hospitality and events

Years
2021 – 2024
Base
Mactan, Cebu
Kit
Stabilised and FPV drones

Budots Media “relied heavily on drones as a means of obtaining cinematic footage”. Since 2021 Bart has been buying hardware and training himself and other FPV pilots. The flights he pitches and prepares include runs over water, from boats and over VIP events.2

He lists clients including the Philippine Department of Tourism and JPark Island Resort and Hotel in Maribago, mostly in adventure tourism and hospitality. Projects he names include:2

  • Ironman 70.3 Cebu, IronKids 2022: which he calls the largest drone project in Cebu, with six pilots placed along the route.
  • Nouveau Camiguin island resort, 2024.
  • Harley-Davidson Sinulog Ride, Cebu, 2024.
  • “15 years of JPark Resort and Hotel”, Maribago, 2024.

A 2025 post adds an FPV flight through Mactan New Town during Ironman 2022. It explains why FPV is used: it can fly “fast, close-range paths that standard camera drones cannot”, which suits sports events and building fly-throughs.6 The same flights also feed the studio's 3D work. One example is a scan of the CCLEX bridge in Cebu for 3D modelling.6

FMA7 · RIDE7 · DIVE7, and Cebu news

Region
Central Visayas (Region 7)
Type
Promotion brands, short-form video

The studio page lists three promotion brands named after Region 7, Central Visayas: FMA7 for Filipino martial arts, RIDE7 for motorsports, and DIVE7 for Cebu as a scuba-diving destination. It also lists a newer Cebu news brand delivering short-form video, and work with the Department of Tourism in Region 7.1

“Love the Philippines” in vector and 3D

Date
June 2023
Output
Vector (SVG/AI), 3D model, animation

On 27 June 2023 the Department of Tourism replaced the decade-old slogan “It's More Fun in the Philippines” with “Love the Philippines”, marking the department's 50th anniversary. Bart published vector versions of the new mark, made by Budots Media, in a post dated the day of the launch.7 A 3D model of the Department of Tourism logo is on Sketchfab, and it's the last item in the 3D viewer below. A later post follows the mark through animation, from social media to large-format print and motion graphics.7

More from the archive

Study — Signal

Media as a waveform

Sound, video and the music work behind Budots all come down to signals over time. This study follows Paper.js's Smoothing example: a curve through twelve moving points. Underneath, its derivative is drawn live, and the dots mark where the slope is zero. Move up and down to change the amplitude, and click to switch smoothing off.

y(x) · dy/dx
signal y(x)derivative dy/dxcritical points, dy/dx = 0

Move vertically to set the amplitude. Click to toggle smoothing.

A spline and its slope

Each of the inner points \(i\) rides two sine waves, with phase \(\varphi_i\) at frame \(n\):

\[ y_i(n) = h + A_n \sin\!\frac{\varphi_i}{100}\,\sin\!\frac{\varphi_i}{200}, \qquad \varphi_i = n + 100\,(i + i \bmod 10) \]

The amplitude eases toward the pointer, a discrete first-order lag:

\[ A_{n+1} = A_n + \tfrac{1}{10}\,(A^{*} - A_n) \;\Rightarrow\; A_n = A^{*} + (A_0 - A^{*})\,(0.9)^n \]

Paper.js then fits cubic Béziers through the points with continuous smoothing, so the slope never jumps. The derivative comes from the tangent:

\[ \frac{dy}{dx} = \frac{B_y'(t)}{B_x'(t)} \]

Switch smoothing off and the curve becomes straight segments: still connected (\(C^0\)), but \(dy/dx\) turns into a step function.

Amplitude A / height
—
Critical points (dy/dx = 0)
—
max |dy/dx|
—
Continuity
—
Field record

Cebu, Lapu-Lapu & the islands

Photographs and renders from his own posts on bartsakwerda.com. Open one for the full image and its source.

Cebu's largest industry is business process outsourcing, and Bart saw automation coming to it early.

In a 2018 post he describes the BPO industry as employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos on inbound and outbound calls. He writes that the Philippines' UTC+8 time zone makes it attractive to English-speaking clients in the USA, Australia and Canada, and calls the automation of call centres the industry's “natural progression”.3

In December 2017 he organised the first chatbot and call-centre automation meetup in Cebu, held at IT Park in Cebu City.3,8 The following year the team built a tourist enquiry funnel on Facebook pages, using ManyChat for structured flows and Google Dialogflow for language understanding. One published sample flow leads a visitor through to a trip to Kalanggaman Island.8

Three languages in one sentence

Language was the hard part. Users mixed dialects within a single conversation: a chat might open in Cebuano and switch to English and Filipino, with abbreviations such as “hm”, “prices” and “bayad” (payment). Bart compiled sample sentences to train Dialogflow intents and entities, including composite entities.8 The training files are public. Their README describes them as messages in Filipino, Cebuano and English sent by users through Facebook pages and Messenger.9 The post also touches on bots in Japanese, with a different character set.8

The team also took note of data-privacy rules including the EU's GDPR, and published the privacy policy and terms of service it used.8 The same GitHub organisation holds a ManyChat Pro tutorial and the files from a tour-planner chatbot design tutorial, all dated December 2018.9

ContextThis was conversational AI before large language models. Every intent had to be anticipated, and every phrasing written out by hand in three languages. The same instinct for automating tourism enquiries runs through the later generative AI work.

The vision post for the Philippines Travel Company is short and blunt. Its four headings name the problems: “Nobody cares”, “No reliable information”, “Philippines Customer Service Sucks”, and the transport system.10

The post summarises them as “too few people taking responsibility for the visitor experience, a lack of reliable, up-to-date information, weak customer service, and a transport system that is hard to plan around, especially between islands.”10

The response it describes is practical: clearer travel information, and maps and directories, for example a directory of ferry connections from Cebu.10 The post is published in Polish, Japanese, Filipino and Arabic. The Filipino version reads: “Praktikal ang naging tugon: mas malinaw na impormasyon sa paglalakbay, mga mapa at direktoryo.”10 It points to a 2026 post about the company at World Travel Market London as the next step.10

Tours, and the Gulf

The company runs island tours, including to Kalanggaman Island off Leyte. Its company page lists a promotional ad of the Philippines aimed at Saudi, Emirati and Qatari audiences, 3D aerial mapping of Punta Engaño on Mactan, and the vector and 3D rendering of tourism logos.11

Meetings, incentives, conferences, exhibitions

A 2025 post turns to MICE tourism. It notes that the Tourism Promotions Board promotes the Philippines as a MICE destination, and that the main convention venues are in Metro Manila and Cebu. For organisers and venues, Budots Media offers drone photography, aerial surveys, 3D scans, virtual tours of event spaces and event video coverage.12 A companion directory, Philippines Event Space, is marked as a work in progress.31

Where visitors actually go

The tourism work leans on data. The Visualizing Tourism in the Philippines app maps Department of Tourism arrival figures by destination.13 The company page uses the same figures to rank top destinations: Cebu City in the Visayas, Davao City in Mindanao and Subic in Luzon.11 Related notebooks on Observable cover international arrivals for January to August 2023 and arrivals across ASEAN in 2019.18

The visualisation style travelled. In an r/Philippines thread charting the distribution of tourism arrivals from 2019 to 2024, the author wrote:

Credits to Bart Sakwerda, since I saw this type of visualization from an old post.r/Philippines, “Distribution of Tourism Arrivals in the Philippines 2019–2024”14

The mapping habit started from necessity.

When arriving in typhoon-torn Philippines in 2014, I had only crude A4 ink printouts I made quickly in Thailand.Bart Sakwerda, “2014–2018 Base maps of the Philippines”15

He had expected that a disaster zone would offer no electricity, printers or internet, and that this would hamper organisation and navigation. He was right.15 In the years after, he built up digital maps, shapefiles and layers for visualising Southeast Asia from several angles. They include Himawari-8 weather-satellite imagery, isometric views of Lapu-Lapu City from the WebGL version of Google Maps (circa 2015), crude vector maps for animation in After Effects, and a vector map of Palawan for social media and video.15 A 2015 tourism map from that period carries the caption “Crude conditions in a small town with only ink printer.”15

The maps went public as data too. In November 2016 he opened geojsonph, a GeoJSON repository of Philippine maps.16 In 2018 the Philippines Tourism Company published a collection of bitmap maps of the Philippines.9 His Dribbble shows the visual side: a CebuMaps identity from 2014, Cebu maps from 2015, a 3D map of Cebu province, a Central Visayas traffic heatmap and the country's terrain projected on a globe.27

Mapping the first 1,000

In December 2016 Bart published an attempt to map the frequency of extrajudicial killings in the first months of the Philippine government's war on drugs, focused on the first 1,000 victims.17 The work drew on the Philippine Daily Inquirer's “Kill List” and was built with Google Maps heatmaps and Fusion Tables. The article noted that the circumstances of death were known in only about 30% of cases, and that killings were concentrated in Luzon: “8 out of ten victims died in Metro Manila.”17

Why it mattersThe same toolkit served both tourism and accountability. Base maps built to promote islands were also used to show where violence happened, and public data was the common thread.

Notebooks and open data

Later data work moved into Observable notebooks: Philippine international arrivals for 2023, ASEAN arrivals for 2019, and a “one chart a day” Philippines map built with D3.18 His Medium also keeps a list of selected Philippine data sources.26 On Hugging Face he published an open image dataset of the Mactan Shrine in Lapu-Lapu City in December 2023.25

Selected maps & data

Eight years after Haiyan, a second super typhoon hit the same region, and this time Budots Media was already there with drones.

Typhoon Rai, known in the Philippines as Odette, struck the central and southern Philippines in mid-December 2021.30 In a LinkedIn article published on 24 December, Bart wrote that Budots Media had mobilised its whole media production capacity for “damage surveys, documenting the unprecedented disaster.” The studio also ran a message relay, because the internet of Lapu-Lapu, a city of about 500,000 people, was offline.19

The article describes clear-up work, damage assessments and drone surveys. It names needs in Maribago and in the municipality of Samboan, mentions a GoFundMe for Maribago's reconstruction, and offers to work with media, mapping and satellite-imaging companies to “calibrate their product with the situation on the ground.” It also points to COVID and red tape as factors that hampered the humanitarian response.19

His later write-up on aerial surveying includes captures from this period: a damage assessment after Odette in December 2021, and a survey after a fire in Barangay Pusok, Lapu-Lapu City.2

Before the media house: App Ops

The earlier disaster work ran through App Ops, an app studio Bart founded out of Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Its Philippine projects included the Bantayan Island identity covering disaster, livelihoods and tourism, and the App Ops Philippines portfolio on Behance.20,24 Both were made in the same years as the reconstruction surveys described above.

Oslob, at the southern tip of Cebu, is known for its whale-shark encounters, and for the tourist photographs that come with them.

In 2016 AppOps PH started a project to identify individual whale sharks in Oslob by analysing tourists' photographs.22 Whale sharks carry a pattern of pale spots that differs from one animal to the next, which is what makes photo-identification of individuals possible.

The project has outlived several platforms. According to Bart's own notes, it moved to Kaggle in 2018, and a dataset followed on Roboflow in 2023.22 In April 2018 he published a GitHub repository, whale-shark-identification, described as “Data and techniques for optimal pattern recognition. Whalesharks in Oslob, Philippines.”23

ThreadThis is the first in a line of computer-vision work that runs through face meshes and image labelling to the gaussian splats and 3D generation on the Gen AI & Data and Aerial Data Ops pages.

Lapu-Lapu City is named after the chieftain who defeated Ferdinand Magellan's forces at the Battle of Mactan in 1521. In 2021 the city marked five hundred years since that battle.

Bart kept a reference board for the anniversary on Pinterest, “1521–2021: 500 years of Lapu-Lapu City, Philippines”, with 46 pins.32 The city also shows up across his datasets. The Mactan Shrine, which commemorates the battle, is the subject of his open image dataset on Hugging Face, and Shangri-La Mactan, Punta Engaño and the beached MV Trans-Asia 1 appear among his 3D captures.25,2

Captures in 3D

Volcanoes, beaches & piers

Philippine terrain and sites on Sketchfab. Pick one, then load the live viewer.

Philippines · SketchfabOpen on Sketchfab ↗
    Sources

    References

    The numbered sources cited above. Articles on bartsakwerda.com, Medium and LinkedIn are Bart's own writing; quotes from them are his words.

    1. Budots Media: multimedia production, original IPbartsakwerda.com
    2. Events that contributed most to interest in Aerial SurveyingMedium, 10 Dec 2024
    3. Budots Media, our productionsMedium, 12 Nov 2018
    4. Madeleine Wood: my experience promoting an electronic music vocalist on YouTubeMedium, 27 Mar 2017
    5. 360-vr-interface-equirect-grid-madeleinewoodGitHub, Aug 2017
    6. Aerial photography in Philippinesbartsakwerda.com, 9 Jan 2025
    7. Love the Philippinesbartsakwerda.com, 27 Jun 2023
    8. Year we spent between Cebu and London learning about chatbot developmentMedium, 31 Dec 2018
    9. PhilippinesTourismCompany: chatbot training data, legals, tutorials, mapsGitHub organisation, Dec 2018 onwards
    10. Why I set up Philippines Travel Company? Visionbartsakwerda.com, 19 Jun 2023
    11. Philippines Tourismbartsakwerda.com company page
    12. MICE event in the Philippinesbartsakwerda.com, 27 Jun 2025
    13. Visualizing Tourism in the PhilippinesNetlify web app
    14. Distribution of Tourism Arrivals in the Philippines 2019–2024Reddit, r/Philippines
    15. 2014–2018 Base maps of the PhilippinesMedium, 1 Jan 2019
    16. geojsonph: GeoJSON repository of Philippine mapsGitHub, Nov 2016
    17. Mapping frequency of extra-judicial killings in the Philippines' war on drugs: first 1000 victimsLinkedIn, 12 Dec 2016
    18. Observable notebooks: Philippine and ASEAN arrivals, Philippines mapsObservable, Sep 2023
    19. Typhoon Odette: emergency response in Lapu-Lapu City by Budots Media, part 1LinkedIn, 24 Dec 2021
    20. Bantayan Island ID: disaster, livelihoods, tourismBehance
    21. 2014 work during reconstruction after typhoon YolandaBehance
    22. 2016 AppOps PH: machine learning in whale-shark identification, CebuMedium, 13 Jul 2017
    23. whale-shark-identificationGitHub, Apr 2018
    24. App Ops PhilippinesBehance
    25. philippines_mactan-shrine_lapulapu_cityHugging Face dataset, Dec 2023
    26. Philippines data: selected sourcesMedium
    27. Dribbble: CebuMaps, Cebu province in 3D, Central Visayas heatmapDribbble
    28. 360 VR music video, “Madeleine Wood — Love Machine”Dribbble
    29. Typhoon HaiyanWikipedia (background)
    30. Typhoon Rai (Odette)Wikipedia (background)
    31. Philippines Event SpaceNetlify web app (work in progress)
    32. 1521–2021: 500 years of Lapu-Lapu City, PhilippinesPinterest board
    Contact

    Salamat,
    see you in Cebu.

    Media production, travel and data work in the Philippines.