Early in the morning on November 27, 2009, Tiger Woods allegedly had an altercation with his wife, Elin Nordegren, that culminated in a career-derailing car crash outside the couple’s Florida home. Details of what transpired are vague—the principals aren’t talking, and no cameras were present. Millions of people who followed the breaking story on CNN, Fox, ESPN, and TMZ had to satisfy themselves with watching file footage of the golfer and his wife.

The incident captured the world’s attention, but no one could actually see it—until an animated reenactment was uploaded to the Web site of an Asian tabloid just hours after it happened. The 96-second videoclip featured Sims-like doppelgängers of the couple and depicted the moments that everyone was clamoring to see: the vehicle colliding with a tree, an unconscious Woods lying in the street as the police arrived, even Nordegren chasing her husband’s SUV down the driveway with a golf club.

Most of Next Media Animation’s videos are about scandals and crimes in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But some of their more ambitious (and surreal) animations are about public figures from America. Here’s a sampling from their videos about Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs, Al Gore, and Sarah Palin.

Someone reposted the clip to YouTube, and the crude, somewhat surreal animation quickly scored 2.5 million views. It was picked up and replayed by many Western news organizations and generated an enormous amount of attention, amusement, and controversy. Mission accomplished for the man behind the video, Hong Kong tabloid tycoon Jimmy Lai. He had launched the CG production house Next Media Animation just a month earlier with the goal of animating the news of the day.

“There’s no better sensation than image. It’s so in-your-face!” the 62-year-old founder of Next Media says. Lai is sitting in the fourth-story office of his headquarters in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, which is the latest outpost of the Next Media empire. He wears a custom-tailored white shirt and a pair of suspenders that hold baggy Ralph Lauren jeans up over his potbelly, giving him a grandfatherly air. But Lai’s beefy face is hard, his eyes fiercely alert. He has the appearance of a man who is always ready to throw the first punch—or the last.

Lai made hundreds of millions of dollars giving Hong Kong readers everything that the more respectable publications wouldn’t deign to present: lurid crime stories, salacious celebrity gossip, voyeuristic paparazzi photos, and scathing political commentary. But by 2007, he was becoming increasingly worried about the future of print, especially its ability to reach a younger audience that grew up with digital media. It also bothered him that his photographers could cover some stories only after the fact. “We had the dead body,” he says, “but we never see the murders.” Was there a way to show things that none of his competitors could?

The idea of cartoonifying the news hit Lai in a brilliant flash. In October 2007, he shared his idea with the rest of his staff. They could gin up exclusive footage of the most bizarre, the most titillating, the most scandalous events of the day. But Lai didn’t want just any animation, he wanted computer-generated 3-D animation, which is notoriously costly, labor-intensive, and extremely time-consuming to create. And they didn’t have a lot of time; the videos had to air while the news was still warm. Lai needed to be able to crank out reenactments of breaking stories in just a couple of hours. “Everybody told me it would be impossible,” he says.

So he decided to build his own CG studio. Lai didn’t know much about animation, but he knew a lot about assembly lines—he made his first fortune in the garment industry. After two years of trial and error, experimenting with various technologies and seeing exactly how many corners it was possible to cut, Lai set up a sort of un-Pixar, an offshore animation factory with a staff of 200 that could storyboard, model, motion-capture, and animate a clip in about the time it takes to watch Toy Story 3 . “People said I was nuts to try this,” Lai says, leaning intently over a conference table. “But everybody knows I’m crazy. I never do things the normal way.”

It’s been a blisteringly hot day here in Taipei, but it’s starting to cool off as the workers at Next Media Animation arrive for the 5 pm to 1 am shift in a neighboring building. Before they punch out, they will create more than a dozen CG shorts in the signature style of their infamous Tiger Woods video. The clips will be posted to the Web sites of Lai’s tabloids in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they typically rack up about 15 million views a week.

That’s a large audience, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the costs of such an ambitious operation. Lai is still searching for a better outlet for this new form he’s created and is casting about for a viable business model. He’s convinced that what Next Media is doing is the future of journalism, and he insists that once you’ve seen his cartoons, you’ll never be satisfied watching a newsreader tell you what happened. “This is like watching a videogame, but it’s the news!”

8:50 pm, May 17, 2010

Story Assignment

Chen Hsi-Ling, a content officer at Next Media Animation, logs on to Adobe Connect to get her next assignment. It’s about an ongoing murder trial in Hong Kong: A young man named Hong Chi-yin is facing a life sentence for two homicides. In January 2009, he hired a prostitute, then suffocated her with a chloroform-soaked towel. A few weeks later, he did the same thing to another prostitute.

Chen is in charge of drawing the storyboards that will guide the production of an animated re-creation of the Chloroform Killer’s crimes. A project manager from the Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong calls and fills her in on the details. As in many outsourcing operations, there’s a language barrier to contend with—people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, while Mandarin is the language of Taiwan. But the written language is the same, and Chen will work primarily from a 400-word summary of the Hong Kong news article. All Next Media animations begin life this way, as a brief synopsis that boils a tabloid story down to its pulpy essence. “The idea is to keep it simple, use the most important details,” says international news editor Daisy Li. “Jimmy doesn’t want it to be too long.”

Lai was born poor in mainland China in 1948, during the civil war that eventually saw the Communist Party take power and the Nationalist Party flee to Taiwan. Smuggled into Hong Kong by his mother’s arrangement when he was 12, Lai eventually got rich manufacturing apparel at the same factory where he had toiled as a child for $10 a month. Lai courted controversy, launching a magazine called Next , which criticized the Beijing government, and producing a line of T-shirts that featured the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests. It quickly became impossible for him to sell merchandise on the mainland or deal with factories there. Ultimately, the Chinese government forced Lai to divest himself of his garment business. That left him free to focus all his energy on becoming the Rupert Murdoch of Hong Kong. Lai soon built a stable of the raciest, muckrakingest, most popular publications in the area. He expanded his operations to Taiwan a decade ago and now has a top-selling newspaper there.

Stories like the one about the Chloroform Killer are typical fodder for Lai’s tabloids. “Seedy crimes with lots of action are very popular for us,” he says. A devout Christian, he named his Apple Daily newspaper after the forbidden fruit in Genesis; Lai reasons that if Adam and Eve had not eaten from the tree of knowledge and introduced sin into the world, there wouldn’t be anything interesting for his writers to cover.

Lai has continued to provoke outrage as his media empire has grown. No mainland Chinese companies advertise in his papers. Someone threw a bomb onto his front lawn. And he earned the ire of millions of teenage fans of Cantonese pop star Gillian Chung—and a censure from the Hong Kong Journalists Association—when one of his tabloids ran photos of the singer taken by a hidden camera in her dressing room. Just two years ago, someone offered a bounty for killing Lai. “It was a triad guy looking to do Beijing a favor, a favor that Beijing didn’t actually want,” says Mark Simon, Next Media Animation’s commercial director.

When Lai decided to create NMA, it seemed natural to build the studio in Taiwan. Unlike Hong Kong, the island nation is beyond the reach of Beijing. Labor is also cheaper there, and the rise of the videogame industry in China had put many CG experts on the island out of work. “Our animators in Taiwan make $20,000 a year,” Simon says.

Within nine months of ramping up its CG assembly line, NMA created more than 4,000 videos. Employees have completely internalized their boss’s love of sensationalism. “I’ve told them that they go too far sometimes,” Lai says, referring to clips depicting rape and child abuse. (The latter resulted in a $30,000 fine and a rebuke from Taiwan’s National Communications Commission.) But Lai waves his hand as if to dismiss all the criticism. He gazes through the glass wall of his office, taking in a sea of people hard at work. “When you are an Apple newsman, you know that you need to be on the edge and make a splash,” he says. “Readers want things to be less subtle. You need to overstep.”

All the News That’s Fit to Animate

The team at Next Media Animation cranks out about 20 short clips a day, most involving crimes and scandals in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But a few are focused on tabloid staples in the US—from Tiger Woods’ marital troubles to Michael Jackson’s death. Seeing them filtered through the Next Media lens is as disorienting as it is entertaining.

Tiger Woods

November 27, 2009

The golf star's car crash was one of the first news events Next Media re-created that went viral. It led to half a dozen animated sequels, in which Next introduced Woods' rapidly expanding roster of mistresses. Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien

January 18, 2010

The animators used clever visual metaphors cribbed from editorial cartoons to explain the absurdities of NBC's late-night feud to an Asian audience. Michael Jackson

February 9, 2010

The pop singer's final moments were reenacted in a piece about the physician charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with his drug-related death. Barack Obama

May 1, 2010

The National Enquirer published a rumor that Obama once had an affair with a campaign staffer in 2004. In no time, Next Media fabricated footage of them entering a hotel together. Steve Jobs

July 18, 2010

In a wickedly satirical clip, Next Media presented the CEO of Apple as a sinister Darth Vader using his command of the Force to seduce customers into purchasing his "iCrap" and choking the life out of snooping gadget bloggers. Al Gore

June 25, 2010

A surreal clip reenacts a massage therapist's allegations about her encounter with Al Gore. Steam shoots from Gore's ears when he is denied a "happy ending," and a thought balloon illustrates how the massage therapist believed that the former veep had turned into a "crazed sex poodle." Sarah Palin

July 23, 2010

Next Media Animation's take on the rise of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska shorts out a Speak N Spell with her coinage "refudiate," and hunting from a helicopter before leaping out and opening a parachute that reads SARAH 2012. (Make sure to hit pause and read all of the crib notes that she's written on her hand.)





9:00 pm

Storyboards and Presentation

Dinner from a nearby takeout joint has arrived at the Next Media office. As people tuck into fried noodles and tofu soup, Chen and a second content officer assigned to sketch the story of the Chloroform Killer get to work. They have 10 minutes to transform the synopsis into comic-book-style storyboards, and they scribble madly.

A half-dozen additional artists in adjoining cubicles are frantically converting other synopses into storyboards. “Four minutes to go!” one of them shouts.

When Chen is done, she meets with a team of animators, modelers, and mo-cap directors in a windowless conference room. They view her storyboards on a digital projector as Chen pantomimes key bits of action, like the killer reaching for a bottle of chloroform. Her audience takes notes furiously. Then they scatter to start producing the actual animation.

It takes pixar up to seven hours to render a single frame of footage—that is, to convert the computer data into video. NMA needed to create an animated clip in a third of that time and render more than a thousand frames of animation in just a few minutes. A team spent two years wrestling with the problem, experimenting with one digital tool after another—Poser, 3ds Max, Maya. “It didn’t look good, and it took too long,” says Eric Ryder, a Next art director. “But Jimmy doesn’t want excuses.”

The solution came in the form of Wang Chuan-chang, a slight and unassuming game-industry refugee who also teaches game programming at National Taiwan University. He developed a proprietary engine that could render crude but effective animation in seconds. Wang’s technology convinced Lai that the project was ready to staff up.

That left Next Media free to grapple with insurmountable problem number two: creating a production process that could function at unprecedented speed, delivering up to 13 minutes of animated video content a day. The team eventually devised a seamless workflow with no unproductive moments and no second drafts. “Everything has to be done within the given time frame,” Ryder says. “Or else the next person in line has no work to do. There are no mistakes. This is what Jimmy commands.”

Lai can be an exacting boss, but he’ll gladly sink a fortune into a business if he believes in it. For instance, Wang wanted the characters to have more realistic facial expressions, which, as anyone who’s seen Next Media’s dramatization of the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien feud knows, is much needed. In response, Lai dropped almost a million dollars for Light Stage, an elaborate hi-def face-scanning technology employed in big-budget movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . Wang, who has just started playing around with it, says that eventually “viewers will be able to see every pore.”

The animators used clever visual metaphors cribbed from editorial cartoons to explain the absurdities of NBC’s late-night feud to an Asian audience.

“Our technology begins by figuring out the three-dimensional shape of the face,” says Light Stage inventor Paul Debevec, who won an Academy Award for the tech. “Then it figures out the underlying skin reflectance, the shine of the skin, the amount of gloss; if one area is greasier than another, that gets picked up. We can predict how the entire face will look under any lighting condition.”

Debevec is excited about the challenge of applying his painstaking approach to Next’s hyperspeed production requirements. “Can you do the rendering of a face quickly and still have it look realistic?” he asks. “A production house like Digital Domain takes six months to do it on something like Benjamin Button . But can you have a technology that allows you to do it between lunch and dinner?”

9:10 pm

Modeling and Motion-Capture

Digital modeler Wu Kan-yang returns to his desk after watching the Chloroform Killer presentation. Armed with Chen’s storyboards, the reporter’s interview notes, and some police photos, he has 20 minutes to assemble all the characters, sets, and props that will appear in the animation. He selects elements from a library of premade digital objects—for instance, hundreds of face and body types. For the murderer, he chooses an angular face and an athletically built body.

Meanwhile, another team is working in the nearby motion-capture studio. Actors in skintight bodysuits dotted with position markers that resemble silver marbles wrestle around on the floor as mo-cap director Joseph Chen yells instructions to them. A male performer presses a foam rubber brick—a stand-in for the chloroform-soaked sponge—into a female actor’s face. The situation is awkward, but no one breaks the tension with jokes or nervous laughter. There’s no time for tomfoolery.

The infamous Tiger Woods video was Next Media’s first viral sensation. Its international popularity caught the company by surprise, especially when the BBC and a Swedish TV station asked how much it would cost to license it. “I made up the numbers as I went along,” Simon says, ultimately charging $300. “That one paid for itself.”

Nevertheless, some alternate source of income is needed. Posting videos on the Web sites of Lai’s tabloids simply does not generate enough ad revenue to pay for the operation. (Lai reportedly spends $1 million a month on it.) Next Media executives have struck a deal with YouTube to show their videos on that site with “pre-rolls,” brief advertisements that precede the animation. But that still pays a pittance per view, and Next Media videos currently posted on YouTube get just a few thousand views each.

The buzz generated by the Tiger Woods animation validated the dream of Next Media honchos that they could go global. Simon envisions a future where big news organizations consider a story complete only when it’s paired with one of his company’s clips. He cites the case of underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who last December attempted to trigger explosives hidden in his briefs while aboard Northwest flight 253. “Most networks had nothing but a shot of the airplane sitting on the runway,” Simon says. “We showed him catching on fire and being pulled down by the other passengers.”

Simon describes a business model in which Next Media sells its content in much the same way that the Associated Press sells articles. “We will do three or four international stories every night and work out syndication deals,” he says. Lai figures that the company needs just 500 outlets to pay $50 apiece per day. But that has yet to happen.

Next Media’s animators have also started producing custom clips for Western news and entertainment media. Reuters tapped them to create an animation about the environmental risks of tuna fishing. BBC’s Newsnight commissioned Next to come up with over-the-top video for the British general elections in April. One clip strings together a few hissy fits and temper tantrums by Gordon Brown along with ominous music and exaggerated mo-cap acting to make the former prime minister look like a psychopath.

These made-to-order pieces are list-priced at $4,000 a minute. It’s a bargain, but customers have to go in with realistic expectations. “I get people telling me they want something with an Avatar feel,” Simon says. “I tell them that they’re not getting an Avatar feel for the prices we charge. I can’t give you perfect animation overnight. But I can show you exactly how a policeman tripped and accidentally shot a little girl in the neck.”

Some customers view the shortcomings in Next Media’s technique as a feature, not a bug. Adult Swim, the nightly block on Cartoon Network, has commissioned Next to create animated reports on bizarre news stories, like the one about an Iranian cleric who claimed that exposed cleavage causes earthquakes. “There’s a ghost in their machine,” says Matt Harrigan, a producer at Adult Swim. “They have limitations that force unusual decisions and interpretations. What we get back is usually different from what we expect. Sometimes it’s really funny.” A clip about the marital woes of Sandra Bullock was presented like the old films on Mystery Science Theater 3000 , with bemused commentary layered on top.

Are the people at Next Media aware that Adult Swim is laughing at them, not with them? “I hope so,” Harrigan says.

But sometimes it’s obvious that they’re in on the joke. A recent clip exploring the power of Steve Jobs and the cultural dominance of Apple is hilarious—on purpose. It features Jobs in blue jeans and a Darth Vader helmet, cackling wickedly as sheeplike customers line up to buy his gizmos—and fatigued factory workers who make those gizmos commit suicide en masse (a reference to a spate of actual suicides at a Chinese factory that makes Apple products). iPhone customers are shackled to a weight that looks like the AT&T logo, and when they complain about dropped calls, Darth Steve slices off their ring and pinky fingers with a lightsaber, eliminating the possibility of blocked reception.

The scandalously clever clip is light-years beyond the Tiger Woods effort and shows that Next Media is well on its way to developing a visual vocabulary combining the stylistic conceits of comic books, political cartoons, videogames, and nightly news segments. The video also shows what the company is capable of making when it slows down a little—animators worked on the Jobs piece on and off for a whopping two days, with most of the extra time spent creating new digital props especially for the clip. “We didn’t have a Darth Vader helmet handy,” explains Michael Logan, Next’s business and content development manager. “It took more time to produce, the same way that a feature story takes more time than a breaking news story.”

9:30 pm

Animation and Postproduction

Digital models and motion-capture data for the Chloroform Killer clip are passed along to the animators, who have an hour to knit the two elements together. The labor is divided among nine people, who each work on one or two shots. Ko Hsiao-li, a slender young woman with a ponytail, focuses on a shot of the killer strolling around the prostitute’s apartment. She continually consults with the animator in a nearby cubicle, making sure their lighting matches and that the actions are in sync.

When the computer animation is finished, it takes only minutes to render it into AVI-formatted video files. Then audio technician Liao Chuen-chung lays in music and sound effects, all chosen from a prerecorded audio library. After a final quality-control review, the files are sent to Hong Kong for editing and Cantonese voice-overs. Total elapsed time: 120 minutes.

The animation about the Chloroform Killer appears on AppleDaily.com as a 40-second breakout inside an 80-second news report, which also features live footage similar to what you’d see in any other TV news segment. The animated sequences are easy to follow even if you can’t understand the Cantonese narration. The animation is sketchy—a plastic bag holding a bottle of chloroform looks ridiculously fake when it moves, and the prostitute’s terror as she struggles for her life is utterly unconvincing. But complaining about the aesthetic is akin to griping about newsprint rubbing off on your fingers; the rough renderings are an unavoidable side effect of rushing out the news while it’s still hot.

A recreation of Next Media’s chloroform killer reenactment with English-language narration. You can see the original version with Cantonese narration on YouTube.

Jimmy Lai has poured more than $30 million into his dream of a CG newsroom. But he’s used to making big gambles. He put up $100 million of his own money to get his tabloid empire off the ground. And during the dotcom boom, he blew $120 million on a failed ecommerce site called adMart. “I had too much money sitting around,” he says with a shrug.

Ultimately, Next Media Animation is part of an even bigger gamble. “TV is a good business right now,” Lai says. He is convinced that Taiwan, a nation of 23 million, is a lucrative untapped market for a Next Media television station. Lai describes his programming vision: There will be variety shows and comedy, but more than two-thirds of the content will be news items featuring Next’s animation.

Unfortunately, with the uproar over Next Media’s rape and child-abuse stories still fresh in the minds of Taiwanese broadcasting czars, Lai was rejected for a broadcasting license. Still, he seems undeterred. He has already stood up to Beijing, so taking on the Taiwanese government hardly daunts him. Lai underscores his optimism by pointing to the floor of employees beyond his office’s glass wall. He claims he already has 700 people making daily content for his TV channel. “We have to be ready,” he says. “At the end of the day, obtaining a license will not be a problem.” But for now, that content has no outlet and no audience.

When adMart was hemorrhaging money, it was Simon who broke with other executives and backed Lai’s decision to pull the plug. Lai is philosophical about that failure, but Simon says it “gave Jimmy diabetes.” Still, Simon is certain that Next Media Animation will never go the way of adMart, even if the path to profitability is unclear at present. “Jimmy always rows the boat to shore,” he says, “though he might burn it on the way in.”

You can almost see the animation: Jimmy Lai is helming a skiff in a churning digital sea. Crudely rendered flames flicker around him as the shoreline comes into view, and a CG stand-in of Simon pulls jerkily on a pair of oars. The Next Media team could really do something with that.

Michael Kaplan(mkap@nyc.rr.com) wrote about the construction of ice hotels in issue 18.06.