Monday, August 23, 2010

The News Cartoons

Tiger Woods may have lost a wife today, but he shouldn't despair. He's helped lift a young and dynamic animation company to fabulous new heights.

Next Media Animation, which launched in September 2009, churns out more than 30 computer-animated dramatizations of news events every day. ... With a staff of 200-plus that is still growing, Next Media Animation, part of the larger conglomerate Next Media Limited, primarily produces clips of local events in Mandarin and Cantonese for the company's Apple Daily newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as for its new online news channel. The animations vary from the funny to the gruesome to the downright boring, but taken together they've been astonishingly successful. In Hong Kong, Next Media's videos average more than 4.1 million hits a day, making it the second most watched news channel in Hong Kong ...

Key to Next Media Animation's success is its speed. In about three hours, says Mike Logan, Next Media's manager of content and business development, its team can go from story idea to finished product. Members of the team work closely with Apple Daily reporters — who gather information for CGI graphics as they report their print stories — in order to work in all the known details. ...

What's fascinating is how many nooks and crannies animation has seeped into. Forget about commercials, television news and sports graphics, or internet humor. Animation now occupies a big part of the creative space of big, live-action movies. Animated characters, cleverly disguised as high-octane stunt performers, now execute the riskier movie stunts in our noisy action epics. And now animation provides employment for the Taiwanese creators of our more sensational news stories.

2 comments:

Floyd Norman said...

Tiger Woods and animation? When I think of animation I think of Tiger West.

Anonymous said...

What? Did he cheat on his wife and kids with at least 11 women, too?

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