Most people are visual consumers, meaning that anytime a picture, graphic, or video is included into a text document, they are more likely to be engaged. For instance, whenever we hear about a car bomb going off, chances are, it will have a bigger impact on us once we see an image or video of it.
Would you rather watch a news broadcast or read about it somewhere? What’s your preference?
Taiwan-based company Next Media Animation (NMA) understands this concept but is taking it to a new level with its animations. The company has received a lot of attention lately for its animations involving everything from Charlie Sheen’s troubled career to Michael Arrington’s recent fiasco with AOL.
NMA is actually part of a larger news conglomerate in Taiwan and covers a wide range of topics. While many of the productions are humorous, Emily Wu, a production manager with the company, told us that NMA also creates hard news productions.
“Often you have breaking news… we have journalists or police reports speaking about what happened, but there is no visual aid to it,” she said. “So, instead of resorting to broll footage, what we can do is put this information into moving graphics.”
Although imagery has always been associated with news, NMA wants consumers to really be able to understand what is going on. For this reason, they not only create animations about news topics, but they also create reenactments and graphic explainers about particular incidents.
“We’re taking this a step further into animating this, so you get a better sense visually as to what happens,” said Wu.
For example, when the stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair last month, the company created this video to help explain what actually happened.
So, how does NMA create these productions? Wu told us that the company has a team of trained journalists that gathers top news for the day. From there, they create a script and send it along to their 300+ team of animators who can complete a 30 second piece in a 3-hour time frame.
Although only a fragment of these animations come to the U.S., they are making quite a splash. One can’t help but wonder if more companies will begin to create similar productions for news distribution. Do you think we’ll begin to see this in the U.S.?
