The third season of National Geographic Channel’s multi-award winning series Taiwan to the World will premiere in its international English-language version tomorrow with Typhoon Hunters, a documentary about Taiwan’s involvement in a multinational project to better understand how typhoons are formed and the forces that operate within these massive and highly destructive weather systems.
Typhoon Hunters is the first of four documentaries that will appear on NGC on successive Sunday nights at 9pm starting tomorrow. Following it will be River Quest, which covers the sport of river racing, which has become popular in Taiwan, and Hip Hop Nation, about a group of Taiwanese hip-hop artists who caught the attention of US show organizers. The final documentary, Tomb Raptors, shown on July 12, will focus on new discoveries about the gray-faced buzzard, a migratory bird that makes annual stopovers in Taiwan.
This series follows two highly successful predecessors; all three were produced in cooperation with the Government Information Office, but meet the high standards that have made National Geographic a byword for informative and attractively packaged programming.
For those with the requisite cable services, Tomb Raptors will be available in high-definition format. According to Joanne Tsai (蔡秋安), general manager of National Geographic for Taiwan and China, the fourth series, for which submissions are currently being reviewed, will all be shot in HD to give audiences the best possible visual experience.
The series goes out of its way to show Taiwan’s involvement in the international community, and to take a perspective that extends beyond the merely local. In the case of tomorrow’s Typhoon Hunters, the project to take measurements during the course of a typhoon, at different times and different altitudes, involved specialists from the US, Japan and Taiwan. The documentary looks at the different contributions of each.
Spanish director Jose Miguel Garcia Sanchez was brought in to oversee the project. According to producer Sunny Han (韓欣欣), Sanchez’s participation helped consolidate the international appeal of the program and provide a broader perspective. “Some things that we took for granted (as a country that deals with typhoons on a regular basis), he felt needed to be treated in more detail,” she said.
Working for National Geographic pushes the boundaries of production companies such as Han’s Local Tiger International, as shooting spanned the whole of the Pacific Rim, beginning with Hawaii, and eventually going to Guam, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Taiwan.
Series 3 of Taiwan to the World will be broadcast in 165 countries and will be available in 34 languages. Apart from local film awards, documentaries from the first and second series also picked up awards at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival and the Montana CINE International Film Festival.
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