Next Media Animation Production Cycle Reduced to a Ridiculous Two and a Half Hours
Whether it’s Mayor Rob Ford or President Barack Obama, the gang at Taipei’s Next Media Animation has turned spoofing breaking and current news events into one fine, accelerated science.
From a recent report on All Things Considered:
Animation is painstaking, time-consuming work. When it first started seven years ago, the animation staff produced one story a day. But after years of trial and error, Next Media, which now employs 200 animators, perfected its pipeline to the fastest it’s ever been — going from story conception to a finished product in less than 2 1/2 hours.
NMA presently cranks out more than four dozen animations per day. Their YouTube channel registers 40-million-plus views per month.
There’s also in Elise Hu’s report another tidbit worth underscoring. The Next Media folks view their biggest humorous hits as 21st century equivalents to old-school print newspaper editorial cartoons. As another sign of the company’s evolution, less than half of today’s output aims for laughs.
Listen to the full NPR report here, and learn more about “wanderlusty reporter” Hu, an alum of digital publication Texas Tribune, here.
P.S. The reason we highlighted the “wanderlusty” portion of Hu’s Twitter profile is that we think this is a wonderfully evocative adjective. We urge all reporters lucky enough to still have an international travel budget to start using the term.
