Google gets punked by Taiwan's NMA animators

When Tiger Woods crashed his car last year, one of the beneficiaries was an Asian media company, Jimmy Lai’s Next Media Animation. NMA produced a computer animated news report illustrating the crash, and it went viral. It was the sort of thing NMA produces for Hong Kong and Taiwan, mixing real news footage with game-style graphics to fill in the missing action. This success encouraged NMA to open a US-oriented YouTube channel -- World Edition -- and blog, and to create more videos with viral potential.

So far, NMA has covered Apple’s Steve Jobs (antennagate), Sarah Palin, Lindsay Lohan, the “fun sized” Snooki from MTV’s Jersey Shore (you don’t want to know) and JetBlue’s job-quitting flight attendant Steven Slater, among others. It’s probably fair to say that one recent effort, Google's domination of the world and loss of mojo (below), does not show the company in a good light, unless you are particularly fond of people sprouting horns and holding tridents in front of flaming backdrops or, like aliens, invading Earth from space.

Although NMA’s World Edition does cover real news such as the Australian polls, plane crashes, and even finance, a lot of the stories are sex driven. The treatment is generally more Benny Hill than News of the World, but the company’s approach has aroused controversy in its home markets. Rose Chao, a spokeswoman for the Taipei city government, said that what Next Media’s newspaper, Apple Daily, has done “is to package sex crimes with animation under the name of news, and this might endanger the hearts and minds of children and adolescents,” according to The New York Times.

NMA’s staff of 200 animators knocks out videos at an impressive speed -- including more than one per day for the World Edition. Apple Daily is the most widely read newspaper in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and in the latter, its videos average more than 4 million hits a day.

The videos in the NMA World Edition channel on YouTube are narrated in Chinese but have English subtitles. Look for the red CC to turn on “closed captions”, if available. The videos in the NMA News channel are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.

In a report broadcast earlier this month on Radio Australia, Professor Alan Knight, from the Asian Media Information Research Centre said:

Television news already relies heavily on constructed images, we use a lot of computer graphs, we use a lot of computer information, animation is a logical way to go, provided it's accurate and it's done in an ethical manner, just another technique for journalists. Of course, the temptation is to go a bit too far. In some ways animation is less than a problem than digitally altered images because with animation at least you know at this stage, it's cartoons, whereas with some of the ways images are manipulated, it takes an expert to work out that they've been constructed to influence your opinion.

As video animation technology is developed, you can expect to see more news outlets doing the same thing. And what the TV channels won’t show you, the web will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YncVKgpTd6E Google's domination of the world and loss of mojo