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CLAD FROM HEAD to toe in black spandex, two fit-looking people run and leap across a giant blue background. At various points on their bodies are shiny markers. In the background, a young man captures their actions on a video camera. Beside him, a couple of his colleagues are tracking the images on computers with large flat screens.
This is the motion capture unit of Next Media Animation (NMA). The team records various types of human movements or re-enacts action scenes and then translates them onto a digital model, hoping to recreate 3D animation that looks as natural as possible. In another room, rows of animators are creating and polishing up computer graphics on flat monitors. The open-plan office in a new building in a Taipei suburb has the feel of a newsroom, except here, people are weaving together graphics instead of words.
NMA bills itself as the largest full-service 3D animation studio in Asia. But don’t expect Kung Fu Panda; NMA was set up in September 2009 to produce short animation clips of news stories. It is a unit of Next Media Ltd, the Hong Kong media group owned by controversial Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai. Next Media is Hong Kong’s largest publicly listed Chinese-language print media company, with several publications in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Its flagship paper is the Apple Daily, known for its racy photos and stories. The newspaper is the second-most popular in Hong Kong; its website, meanwhile, gets more than four million hits a day.
Set up to produce animation clips to complement stories that appear on the Apple Daily website in Hong Kong and Taiwan, NMA animates “all the news that’s fit to animate”, says its international content editor, Richard Hazeldine.
Its clips have overwhelmingly focused on domestic news stories and are in Chinese. Then, in November 2009, following a bizarre car accident involving the world’s top golfer Tiger Woods, NMA produced a short video clip reenacting what happened. The clip was transported from its website to YouTube, where it quickly went viral.
That jolted NMA to start an international wing, says Hazeldine, who was hired 15 months ago with two others for this purpose. The international team, now 12-strong, produces animations of global news stories that will be of interest to news companies outside of Hong Kong and Taiwan. They also customise clips for customers that have included BBC, Reuters and the New York Post.
