A Taiwanese virtual reality (VR) film won an award at an extended reality art festival in Paris, the festival’s organizers announced on Friday, with jurors praising it as a breakthrough in VR filmmaking.
Taiwanese VR film Red Tail Ep.1 (紅尾巴Ep.1) won the jury’s Special Mention Award at the fifth annual NewImages Festival, which ran from Tuesday last week to yesterday.
Red Tail Ep.1 is the first VR project helmed by Taiwanese animator Fish Wang (王登鈺), best known for his 2018 animated short Gold Fish (金魚), which won significant recognition including the Golden Horse Award for best short animation in 2019.
Alongside a strong production team to help build the movie’s VR world, it took Wang two years to create the film, an adventure story about a youth chasing a floating red tail in the sky to a fantasy city.
Jurors said that not only were the artistic aesthetic and fantastical ambience of the film mesmerizing, the way it was made was also a major breakthrough in VR filmmaking.
Juror Priscila Guedes said the film was given the special mention award because the jury agreed that they all saw a lot of potential in the project.
While there are technical limitations and challenging artistic choices that come with VR filmmaking, the jurors saw more possibilities for the genre after being captivated by the artistry and story of Red Tail, she said.
Speaking from Taiwan, Wang said he was grateful for the efforts of his technical team, which helped him make his first VR film, and that the honor truly belonged to his whole crew.
He also revealed that the full version of Red Tail was completed last week, and that he looked forward to premiering the project at the upcoming 22nd Kaohsiung Film Festival in October, as well as potentially entering it in the Venice Film Festival in September.
Wang’s win marks the second time that a Taiwanese submission was recognized at the NewImages Festival, after Bodyless (失身記2.0), a film by Taiwanese new media artist Huang Hsin-chien (黃心健), won the Masque d’or (Golden Mask) Grand Prize in 2020.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS