The weird new world of computer-animated news – The Guardian
It could have been anyone really: a car crash, an affair and a golf club. But when this particular story broke at the end of November 2009, it was Tiger Woods who marked the start of an unlikely new medium for celebrity news: computer animation.
As the story gained traction, 24-hour news channels across the world filled our screens with stock footage of Woods on a golf course, his wife Elin Nordegren in happier times and aerial shots of the road outside their house. Then a crazy slice of animation exploded across the internet, one of those "you’ve got to see THIS!" OMG memes that fill inboxes and Facebook walls. Here was Woods (or rather, a blocky, computer-generated approximation of him) at home with Nordegren. They’re arguing. She wacks him in the face. He bursts out of their house, drives off in the family SUV; she chases after him and as he looks back at her brandishing a golf club (what else?), the car ploughs into a fire hydrant. Is this how he crashed? Who knows? What matters is that there was suddenly some exciting footage to feed into the news cycle.
Welcome to the weird world of Next Media Animation (NMA), where they never let a little thing like a lack of video get in the way of showing the gory details of a celeb story. No paps on the scene? No problem: make it up! Since the Woods story, the Taiwanese animation studio has built an international cult following with a string of increasingly surreal viral hits involving cartoon versions of everyone from Wayne Rooney to Sarah Palin and Julian Assange – all pinging across the internet just a few hours after a story breaks. As the subtitles to a recent greatest hits compilation to mark its "one year Tiger-versary" put it: "Over the past year, NMA has brought the world so many LOLs . . ."
If some of those "LOLs" have passed you by, you have missed the chance to see Rooney playing keepy-uppy in a hotel room in his England kit while two scantily clad women do Suduko puzzles on the bed. Or Palin machine-gunning bears from a helicopter as her family lounge around the living room in tracksuits. Or Vince Cable stomping off after undercover reporters encouraged him to slag off Rupert Murdoch. Did you wonder why Ricky Gervais disappeared for an hour during the Golden Globes? According to the NMA version, he was getting bashed around by the Hollywood establishment unamused by his jokes – Tim "Buzz Lightyear" Allen takes a powerdrill to his funnybone. You might remember Gordon Brown on Channel 4 news insisting that of course he’s never hit anyone – in the NMA animated version, you also get to see Brown decking an aide and punching the back of the car seat so hard that his driver goes flying (the words "FUCKING EGO" float across the screen). The story about the undercover police officers infiltrating environmental protest groups? Here they are, in bed.
NMA has even found a way to represent the shady actions of whole countries. When the WikiLeaks story broke about the US spying on UN diplomats, there was Uncle Sam in a top hat and stars-and-stripes outfit, like a deranged Colonel Sanders, sneaking around the UN loos in search of DNA samples, before getting into a punch-up with Assange. Meanwhile, the Nobel peace prize announcement had China (an angry panda in a red army cap waving a baseball bat around) chasing after its dissidents and bullying other countries. All the videos are in Mandarin, with English and Chinese subtitles, and are wrapped up with a cheery signoff from cartoon NMA News anchor girls Vanessa and Jen-Jen. It’s as if The Sims have come alive and started up their own international news station.
Just as interesting as the outlandish content is the ferocious speed with which the company produces it all. This instant noodle Pixar is even more impressive when you learn that the clips of Obama, Rooney and Assange are "just a fraction" of the company’s daily output.
Michael Logan, NMA’s business and content development manager, explains: "Next Media Animation has 300 animators, we produce close to three hours of finished content per week. We have 14 production slots each day, and within each production slot we can do four stories – so that’s 50-odd stories, and most of that production is for our own media outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan."
It is an ambitious offshoot of the Next Media organisation, a pan-Asian company started in Hong Kong by Jimmy Lai, an entrepreneur who once sold T-shirts honouring student leaders during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in the Giordano clothing chain – Hong Kong’s answer to Gap. In Asia, the Next clips depict anything from serial killers to tawdry murder cases, but it is the use of western politicians and celebrities that has seen its videogame-like cartoons appearing everywhere from Newsnight to CNN.
"We have the Hong Kong Apple Daily newspaper, we have the Taiwan Apple Daily newspaper and we have the Taiwan TV station and then we have the international content, which is the content that most of our viewers overseas are familiar with," Logan says. "Because it’s news, obviously we have to turn it around quickly – within the news cycle. So when a piece goes into production, within about three hours we have finished animation that’s ready to use. We’re constantly refining the process to get it faster and faster.
"It’s sort of like an editorial cartoon that you might see on the opinion page [of a newspaper], but since it’s animation it’s like having a dozen – two dozen – editorial cartoons all within 90 seconds. Typically when you do animation you make the 3D model first before you begin to animate. Making the models takes weeks and weeks and weeks. Because we have a vast database of models already made, we can just go into the library, grab the models we need, adjust them to get them to look the way we want, and then proceed to animation. That’s the reason we can do it three hours as opposed to three weeks or three months."
NMA uses body motion capture animation technology similar to that used in films such as Avatar or Spider-Man, with actors playing a versions of incidents where no footage exists. Information from nodes connected to the actor’s suit is then fed into the computer animators and used to drive the avatar characters in the short clips.
"We custom-made our Obama model and that took three weeks to do. Sarah Palin – we haven’t got round to making a custom model for her," says Logan. "At the moment we have something that sort of resembles her – every time she appears she has a machine gun, that’s sort of the prop that identifies her. You can do that with certain politicians. With David Miliband, he’s famous for making some gaffe with a banana, so we’d depict him with a banana. Ed Miliband, we might give him a red cape – Red Ed."
Another story the studio jumped on was the reports of early iPhone 4 users complaining about dropped calls when holding the phone in a certain way. NMA’s version had Steve Jobs as Darth Vader solving the problem by cutting off fingers with his lightsabre. "His reality distortion field is so strong that he would view the last two fingers on your hand as the design flaw and not the iPhone 4 as having the design flaw. His way of fixing it is to chop off the fingers rather than fixing the phone," Logan says, deadpan.
Even if the rich, famous and powerful avoid film crews and paparazzi, they can’t stop the world visualising the truth behind stories about them. "We try to choose things for which there is no original video and you can use animation to bring out the visual images," says Logan. "The WikiLeak cables say Muammar Gaddafi hangs around with a Ukranian nurse – we can show that through animation. From what we’re aware of, there’s no footage of that."
As Vanessa and Jen-Jen warn cheerfully, at the end of their "Tiger-versary" compilation: "So, watch out, guys. Wherever you are in the world. If you’re famous enough and behave badly enough, you might end up in our of our pieces. Don’t make us animate you!"
▶ The onscreen newsreader (1954): The first BBC news bulletin was presented by Richard Baker. However, viewers at the time wouldn’t have realised because his "illustrated summary of the news" consisted entirely of maps and still photographs while he read the stories offscreen. When the unpopularity of this approach was revealed, talking faces were quickly drafted in, the first being correspondent ER Thompson. Over the decades, newsreaders would be augmented by reports from correspondents, first by phone, then through video and finally by hologram (see below).
▶ The news ticker (1992): A technology thought to be popularised by German news channel N-TV, the ticker ensured viewers would never miss important information again. Sometimes supporting facts run underneath a story. Sometimes news about another story runs underneath. Sometimes only the words "Breaking news" runs underneath a story with no accompanying text, to reinforce how important the news is. It was genuinely revolutionary.
▶ The Day Today (1994): By the early 90s, news had become unstoppably authoritarian, full of newsreaders sitting in chilly blue prison planets surrounded by whirling globes and computer-generated glass. This approach was spoofed mercilessly in Chris Morris’s news satire The Day Today, where objects were manipulated in increasingly impossible ways. Five years later, BBC News replaced the showy bombast with a warmer palette and desks that actually existed.
▶ Election Night technology: Happily the graphics geeks were still let out on election night, allowing Peter Snow’s two-dimensional Swingometer to become needlessly complicated. First it flew out of its screen. Then it transformed into a virtual roulette wheel. Then it grew steps, allowing pundits to stroll around inside it. And then, perfectly, in 2006 it turned into a monkey with John Major’s face that Jeremy Vine could crouch down and talk to.
▶ The roving anchor (1997): To add dynamism to a stale formula, Channel Five stole Kirsty Young’s chair and made her read the news while perched on her desk like a chatty co-worker. This evolutionary breakthrough eventually led to Sky’s adoption of its news wall – a giant seven-metre screen that stretched all the way across the studio floor, allowing presenters to wander across it whenever they either wanted to convey scale. Three years after that, ITV News got silly and spoiled it all by spending a million pounds on something it called the Theatre Of News, a concept so obviously ridiculous that nobody has ever been known to actually refer to it out loud.
▶ CNN hologram (2008): As if Barack Obama’s election win wasn’t already historic enough, CNN decided to add to the occasion by rolling out its new holographic technology. Several cameras could shoot a remote correspondent in three dimensions, and then beam it to the studio to make it seem like they were really there. Of all the Star Wars technology that could have been invented by CNN, this is almost certainly the most disappointing.
Stuart Heritage
