TRAX
The team behind TraX is motivated by what host Dave Johnson sees as a lack of English-language documentaries that cover “contemporary history, nature, or the more quirky things about Taiwan ... also, what is available isn’t particularly impressive in visual terms.”
Shot and edited by Colin Phoenix, TraX is produced under the banner of Guan Xi Media, a Taichung-based platform for artists of all kinds.
Photo courtesy of James Osborne
Guan Xi Media is led by Michael Schram, a Canadian resident of Taichung. “Michael occasionally accompanies us when we shoot a video, but the most important thing is that Guan Xi Media is a registered media company. That carries a bit of weight and opens doors. Through it, we’re now members of Association of Taiwan Journalists (台灣新聞記者協會),” Johnson says.
The company’s senior translator and coordinator Kelly Zheng (鄭安閑) also significantly contributes to the production process, Johnson says.
“Guan Xi Media was looking to start a video series, and they found me through the stories and photography I’d put online. I went for a meeting to see if our interests matched, and they did,” Johnson recalls.
Photo courtesy of TraX
The series was named TraX to incorporate the X of Guan Xi and also to allude to “making tracks,” Johnson says. Guan Xi’s YouTube channel includes Urb-X, a series of urban exploration videos also made by Phoenix.
Before TraX got up and running, Phoenix had professional video and editing experience, “whereas I had absolutely no experience in front of the camera. I’m not a natural and I have to fight really hard to pull it off,” Johnson says.
“We felt that many of the videos showcasing Taiwan are vlogs, and they concentrate on things like food and night markets. We want to make mini-documentaries that will still be watchable and relevant 10 years from now,” says Johnson, an Englishman who’s lived in Taiwan for 12 out of the past 16 years.
Photo courtesy of James Osborne
“We have a real love of nature, the outdoors, history, and being out there on the ground” he says.
Of the 10 videos TraX has so far put out, Johnson is most proud of “Taiwan’s Ghost Island” (about a now-uninhabited island in Penghu County) and “Chasing the Sugar Train” (featuring the last functioning section of Taiwan Sugar Corp railroad): “They’re the most visually impressive. But I’m proud of all of them, despite fairly low viewing figures. We have an impeccable like/dislike ratio, and an exceptional ‘like’ engagement of about 10 percent.”
“Taiwan’s Ghost Island” has been nominated for a prize in the Formosa Festival of International Filmmaker Awards’ best focumentary short film category.
Photo courtesy of TraX
Unlike TraX’s other videos, which are based on research Johnson has done during the several years he’s been exploring the country, “Taiwan’s Ghost Island” benefited from input from local researchers.
The most difficult aspect of making videos, Johnson says, is dealing with weather and light issues.
“We’ve done two videos on railways, and we had to fit ourselves around their schedules to get the footage we need. If conditions aren’t ideal, we try our best to work around it,” he says.
Photo courtesy of James Osborne
The TraX team has encountered a few legal issues. After releasing a video featuring a tunnel they’d explored, they were contacted by the Forestry Bureau.
“Before we filmed, we weren’t able to find out who owned the tunnel. The Forestry Bureau then told us it fell under their jurisdiction, and they asked for the video to be taken down. We argued that the video was of educational importance and in the public interest, and they’d not made a serious attempt to seal up the tunnel,” Johnson says. In the end, the video was allowed to stay online because the bureau dropped their complaint.
JAMES OSBORNE
“From before I can remember, I was always poking around ponds and looking under logs and rocks for frogs, lizards, and bugs,” says James Osborne, who uploads videos of after-dark wildlife to YouTube under his own name.
Now living in Taipei, where he teaches English, the New Zealander has been building up his knowledge of ecology and geography, and researching local reptiles, amphibians, and mammals.
“If you follow my channel, you may notice I’m more and more informed about species as time goes by,” he says.
For practical reasons, he’s not invested as much time in studying birdlife or insects: “Birds are too hard to shoot with my setup. The bugs here can be otherworldly, but it’s hard to find much information and the diversity is too vast.”
“When you go out to look for wildlife, you never know what you might encounter, so you can’t prepare much for a shoot,” he adds.
Osborne says that once he’s finished shooting, he needs between 10 and 30 hours to edit the footage and add English and Chinese subtitles.
“I’m a one-man operation, but I have friends who proofread and correct my subtitles. I enjoy the whole process and everything I learn along the way,” he says.
If he ever monetizes his channel, he adds, any income will first go to paying someone to do the subtitles.
Shooting wildlife is hardly easy, Osborne explains: “Animals are just doing their thing and seldom cooperate with the shoot. Sometimes I’m hanging off a tree with a camera in one hand and a light in the other. Other times the subject is too fast, too far away, or just won’t face the way you want it to. You go into nature, and you get what nature gives you.”
Inevitably, he has come across wonderful sights but hadn’t been able to get his camera out in time. He describes such experiences as “exciting but a bit gutting.”
Osborne has noticed that how he feels about a finished video is no guide to how many views it’ll get. He was quite satisfied with “Dung Beetle Rolling Poop” — but it failed to set the Internet alight. A couple of others which he threw together in a rush have done much better.
In terms of views, “Finding Glowing Scorpions with UV Light,” which he shot on Kaohsiung’s Cijin Island (旗津), is the most successful of the 31 videos he’s uploaded to YouTube, probably because it received some media attention.
Osborne accepts that his channel is unlikely to ever make much money. “But it’s opened some doors and allowed me to meet like-minded people,” he says. “I’ve been approached by a company to sell them footage for a film about Yangmingshan (陽明山). I’ve made friends and contacts with others in Taiwan who adore or research wildlife. That in itself is worth more than gold.”
Steven Crook has been writing about travel, culture and business in Taiwan since 1996. He is the author of Taiwan: The Bradt Travel Guide and co-author of A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist