Months ago an animated video, numbered episode zero — on how Taiwanese might have ended up greeting each other with bonjour — was uploaded to YouTube, and in no time had tens of thousands of views and garnered thousands of likes and shares on Facebook.
“People might think that ‘selling Taiwan’ is a term coined only recently,” the narrator starts, a reference to contemporary politics — as politicians allegedly involved in under-the-table negotiations with China have been accused of selling Taiwan. It turns out that the clip is about how the Japanese colonial government had once seriously entertained the idea of selling Taiwan, which it obtained after the First Sino-Japanese War, to France.
Taiwan Bar, which is how the maker of the video refers to itself, has since released at least six episodes and mini-episodes on Taiwan’s history, all focused on the Japanese colonial period.
Photo: Taiwan Bar
When asked why Taiwanese history, and the Japanese-governed era in particular, was picked as the theme, Taiwan Bar CEO DJ Hauer (謝政豪) said without hesitation: “It sells.”
“The social atmosphere after the student-led Sunflower movement in March last year told us that there is an audience for Taiwan’s history,” he added.
“Of course we have also been prompted by the idea of making a social contribution. However, we are not an issue-fixed social group; we are a for-profit company,” Hauer said.
The use of animation, is also aimed at turning a profit, he said.
“Characters can be designed and licensed; they can make cross-over appearances in other series too,” he said.
In the Taiwanese history series, three cartoon characters were inspired by the Formosan bear, the Taiwanese blue magpie and the Formosan landlocked salmon. The bear, nicknamed “black beer” (黑啤), has been made into a stuffed toy and is sold as one of the company’s branded products.
The Taiwan Bar team, now consisting of 15 members, began its first project on Taiwanese history with four founders — all in their twenties — as contributors: Hauer as producer; high-school history teacher Thomas Xiao (蕭宇辰); JiaJiach (張佳家), an animator whose specialty is graphic design and illustration; and narrator Buchi (林辰), who made his own videos on social discourse before joining the team.
The Taiwan history project has four more episodes planned on post-war Taiwan, including the White Terror era, before it ends, but the company already has plans for more projects.
The team recently aired an animated short introducing Dihua Street (迪化街) and its history as Taipei’s famous “boulevard of Lunar New Year products” under a series titled Story Taipei. It is a project sponsored by the Taipei City Government.
“They first came to us with the idea of making a promotional video solely for the street, as the Lunar New Year was approaching. However, I asked for a whole project that would include Taipei’s other commercial districts,” Hauer said.
A full project would be better for city promotion and cost-efficiency, as the cost of convening a team for the production would be marginalized and newly designed characters could be better cultivated in a complete project consisting of many episodes, he said.
A character resembling a hermit crab has been designed for the Story Taipei series, “which signifies Taipei residents’ migrant characteristics, with the shell symbolizing their wish for blissful living.”
Strongly emphasizing the fact that Taiwan Bar is “a new media company” rather than a commercial or production firm, Hauer said that, while people talk about cloud computing and social networking in Taiwan when the topic of “new media” is brought up, “what’s really new about it, or the crux of the matter, are changed user habits.”
“For example, binge-watching is a habit formed by new media,” he said.
As Internet users are exposed to an excessive amount of information online daily, what and how to receive information and via which platforms could also be developed as habits. An entire online community could be built with the company’s cooperation on different platforms and sources of knowledge and expertise, which, in fact, perfectly suits the team’s next big project: education.
Crash Course, an educational channel covering various subjects on YouTube, was repeatedly mentioned during the interview with Hauer, who has been a patron of similar online tutorials since his experimental-school years.
“Who is to tell you what to learn and in which order, as arranged by schools and textbooks?” Hauer said.
Their ambitious educational project will be launched in five years, he said.
Taiwan is strong in audio and visual storytelling, where unbound creativity, freedom of speech and copyright protection are essential, and currently nonexistent in China.
“We have an immense market with little competition now,” he said.
“Taiwan could become the beacon of digital content,” the 24-year-old said.
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