NextMedia (AnimatedNews) Tour

Today I had the pleasure of touring NextMedia Animated studios in Neihu,
and got to see each step of their lightning fast production process.

This is the world's fastest Animated news production studio,
producing a piece of animated news, that goes from conception
to Youtube or ready-for-TV in a remarkably short 3 hours!



About 300 team members work in parallel to quickly move along
information that is passed along between team members that work in tandem on
different cuts of the animation to minimize the time required.

First The news piece is chosen. Next the storyline is written and camera angles are
decided. Next is my favorite part, a team of about 3 actors, covered in sensors to capture their movements, act out the storyline. Next the characters are modeled, textured, and other background objects are added via CAD. Everything is spliced together, and edited in Adobe Premier, thats it!

I really enjoyed the experience to see what it takes to produce each animated news piece lasting only a few minutes.

Awesome!
PS.. Also picked up my WeatherGirls poster

2011, HK, Visa's, and Chinese New Year

2011 is already off to a running start.
Chinese New Year is Feb.3rd, so every shop
is selling gift packages, and you can hear the
"恭喜，恭喜“ song playing everywhere,gongxi,gongxi,
means congratulations, happy to have the new year
and leave behind the old year and its troubles.
Hong Kong is going to have a large parade and
fireworks here on the 4th, but I'll be back in TW
by then..

I'm writing this from Hong Kong, where I'm here
on a visa run, because my visa in Taiwan
was "unextendible" so this wasn't as planned as
I'd liked, but things have turned out alright.

Hong Kong is a huge well oiled, fast-paced machine.

Its definitely the New York of Asia.
I'm suprised how multicultural it is.
I see a huge population of people from India,
S.E. Asia (Thailand), and way more white people
than I expected to see.

With all the finance and banking that goes on here,
Hong Kong is home to a wide variety of people and cultures,
in contrast to Korea, Taiwan, and Japan which are more
monocultural in comparison.

Tonight I went to Temple Night market near Jordan station was
filled with tons of stalls, hocking watches, paintings,
bootleg dvds, belts, pants, and much more.

Down a perpendicular street to temple market is a host of street type food
eateries, mostly selling seafood and beer. There was a lot of Indian
men passing out fliers for their curry restaurants. Not sure why, but
I took a flier for "New Delhi Curry" and went there to eat. Food was
good.

Sure was difficult to find a bathroom!!! I wandered around until I finally
found one, way down the dark street and 3 flights of stairs up...

Earlier today, I went to the other Island I also went out to the huge Buddha statue on Lantau Island, albeit it is touristy, but its nice to get out of the urban
concrete maze of malls and skyscrapers for a bit. There's an approximately 25min
Cable car, super long, that goes from the airport area, across a body of water, over
a few mountains, and arrives at the village.

Back in Taiwan, I'm working on job leads, and have to push harder.

Whats the weather like here now?? It's cold!!!

Peace/Out