Lin Kwei-yu (
He is the owner of Jamar Idea Production, (甲馬創意), a digital animation production company.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Sitting in his new office in Chungho, Yufu is surrounded by other high-tech companies. He works rapidly with his mouse, moving pictures around his screen.
PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMAR IDEA PRODUCTION
"See, I can quickly create a picture of Chen Shui-bian kissing Annette Lu. I just take this picture from the database and then make a small change here, add the background of the presidential palace. I have finished a cartoon in just five minutes," Yufu says, explaining his new computerized technique for creating political cartoons.
Yufu began his career as a political satirist. He still contributes cartoons to more than 20 magazines and newspapers everyday, including the Chinese-language Liberty Times, and the English-language Taiwan News.
PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMAR IDEA PRODUCTION
"Compared with the traditional method of using pen, paper and ink, I've gained a lot of time for myself," he said. "It used to take one or two hours to draw a picture. Now it's a matter of minutes."
One year ago, Yufu left his position as creative director of Sanlih TV Corporation (三立電視台), giving up an annual income of NT$7 million in order to set up his own company for creating digital content.
He did this when Taiwan was on an economic ebb tide that had hit Internet-related industries particularly hard. Many people thought he was crazy.
Yufu's face used to be on TV every evening for the primetime call-in show Eight O'clock Talk (八點大小聲). In the period before Jamar opened he disappeared from public view. He says he has only recently emerged from a thousand-day stint eating lunchboxes and focusing on his ideas for Jamar.
Now he's back -- but with a new look. He is now very much the businessman and hangs out with software makers, game producers and animators. Last November, Yufu took his product Chuang Tzu (莊子) to the first Taiwan Award for Digital Content(台灣優質數位內容產品獎) offered by the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). And he didn't come away empty handed either.
One of Jamar's early products is a cartoon animation called Between Confusion and Enlightenment (
Each episode features two characters, a Buddhist master and an acolyte, who spend a couple of minutes discussing everyday philosophy and illustrating the tenets of Buddhism. It was the first cartoon based on Buddhism to use film animation production processing.
The technique combines 3D and 2D animation. The former makes the figures look more vivid and lifelike, while the 2D drawing style is intended to convey the simplicity of Zen.
Combining 3D and 2D techniques may not be original -- it has been used most recently in the Hollywood studio animations Stallion and Ice Age -- but Yufu has a few tricks of his own. He is the first to incorporate Chinese ink-wash painting into digital animation.
The 3D techniques makes the figures and their movements more detailed. These figures are then transposed into 2D, to create the unique effects seen in the award-winning Chuang Tzu.
Chuang Tzu is part of an ambitious series by Jamar called Great Chinese Thinkers (中華文史哲思想家系統). The project aims to transfer all of Tsai Chih-chung's (蔡志忠) comic books into animation.
Tsai, a well-known cartoonist, is the man who transferred the works of the great Chinese philosophers such as Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu (
These comics have proved an enduring favorite and have sold more than four million copies in Taiwan and 20 million in China. They have been translated into 41 languages. Tsai was chosen by CommonWealth magazine as among the 100 most influential people to promote Chinese culture.
Yufu's technique of 3D to 2D transposition was partly developed to help create a format suitable for expressing Tsai's work, especially the simplicity of the ink wash drawing.
Taiwan's Public Television Service (PTS) has already acquired the screening rights to the animations.
In addition to Chuang Tzu, Jamar has already completed production on animations for Tsai's comics on Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu and military genius Sun Tzu.
"We're planning to produce 25 animations in two years," said Tsai Yuan-lung (蔡元隆), project manager at Jamar.
Taiwan is not short of animation companies with high-profile products.
There is animation giant Hung Guang Animation (宏廣動畫), which established its reputation in the 1980s in OEM work for major US studios such as Disney.
Recently the company has begun to increase the proportion of own-brand products.
Another famous company is Spring House International (春水堂), best-known for its A-kwui (阿貴) Internet animation series.
But Yufu insists that he will only create original content and will steer clear of Internet-based animation. Even though he is the new kid on the block, he believes he has his own niche.
"TV or film animation requires 30 frames per second, compared to 12 frames per second for Internet animation. We want to produce higher quality, more profitable animation products," Yufu said.
Invested by Taiwan's electronic group Inventec (英業達集團) and with NT$5 million capital, Jamar now employs 20 staff.
"Of course, having a celebrity as our creative director helps. Yufu's name and wide contacts has helped a lot when seeking business partners," said Tsai Yuan-lung.
And Jamar is resolutely modern.
"Here we have no ink, no celluloid boards. Everything is digital," said Yufu. With the traditional method, using a 30-frames-per-second format, you have to draw 30 pictures for that second. But now, we render the 30 sequential motions through a mathematical calculation," explained project manager Tsai.
This is one of the reasons why the company doesn't need a huge staff. At Jamar, the cartoonists are skilled computer hands with design ability. Four people are able to complete a single animation project.
Talking about his young animation company, Yufu seems to be at ease and extremely confident. "Because I live a very digital lifestyle, I know what the next trend will be," said Yufu.
He said he is the kind of person who makes his own digital movies whenever he takes the family for a trip. "I talk to my daughter, who is studying is the US, everyday by video conferencing," he said. "I haven't written down my schedules for years," he added, for he always has a Palm Pilot handy.
Yufu's newest idea is to make Jamar's animation characters available through wireless Internet connections and is now negotiating with Chung-Hwa Telecom to become the content provider for their Multimedia-on-Demand (MOD) service.
But it isn't these exciting plans that make Yufu look so contented and relaxed. It's the fact that technology has helped free up his time. "I'm now freer and have more time to go diving and horse-ridding," he said with a smile.
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