Both are from the NY Times. First, a story about the first film to be released in both Koreas at the same time.
Meanwhile, here's a news anchor who blogs. Eh, it's not Teeveepad, but it's getting there...
Uniting the Two Koreas, in Animated Films at Least
Published: August 31, 2005
By MARK RUSSELL
SEOUL, Aug. 29 - It is the most Korean of folk tales. A young girl, Shim Chung, gives her life to a sea dragon so that her blind father may see again - and is rewarded for her filial piety by becoming an empress.
Now Shim Chung has earned another reward for her selfless sacrifice: an animated version of her ancient tale has become the first film to be released at the same time in North and South Korean movie theaters. "Empress Chung" opened on 51 screens in South Korea on Aug. 12, followed by 6 screens in North Korea on Aug. 15 - 60 years after the end of World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union divided control of the Korean Peninsula.
"Empress Chung" is also a labor of love for Nelson Shin, and an expensive labor at that. Mr. Shin, a Korean-American animator, worked for seven years and spent more than $6.5 million of his own money to tell the classic tale.
Mr. Shin, 65, has devoted a lifetime to animating other people's stories, including 20 years at AKOM, his production company in Seoul, doing the grueling work of grinding out the tens of thousands of drawings needed in each episode of "The Simpsons" and other Western television shows. But he wanted to tell his own stories, so he started a new animation venture to create "Empress Chung": KOAA Films, based in the United States.
"I picked 'Empress Chung' because it had the most drama," Mr. Shin said, "and it is full of our Korean tradition." He was able to finance the film himself, but to cut expenses he turned to animators in North Korea, where labor costs a small fraction of what it does in South Korea. He worked with about 500 animators ("100 in the South, and the rest in North Korea") to create the 500,000 drawings required for "Empress Chung."
"The usual 'Simpsons' episode has about 20,000 cells in 22 minutes," Mr. Shin said. "So 'Empress Chung' had a lot of details."
"North Korean animators are excellent," he added. "They learn quickly and work very hard." The SEK animation studio in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, which did the animation, has been involved in an array of international productions since the late 1990's.
It was a natural connection for Mr. Shin, who was born in what is now North Korea in 1939. He was 12 when he walked with his family from North Korea to the South during the Korean War. "I remember the bombs going off overhead," he said.
Despite the hard times after the war, Mr. Shin knew he wanted to draw. After doing editorial cartoons for newspapers and working on some animated films, he immigrated to the United States in the 1970's. He found work with DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, one of the main subcontractors for Warner Brothers cartoons, and stayed on after Marvel Comics bought the company in 1981. Highlights of those years, he said, included helping create the light sabers in the original "Star Wars" film, producing the television series "The Transformers" and directing the movie version.
But it was an emergency rush in 1985 for the film "My Little Pony: The Movie" that allowed Mr. Shin to start Akom Studio in Seoul. In only 10 weeks, his newly formed team of animators was able to create the 300,000 cells required for the 1986 film. "We all just worked nonstop," he said.
It was a bountiful time for animation. In 1994, the South Korean government finally recognized the economic potential of the industry and started to support it (a far cry from 1967, when the government labeled cartoons one of the "six evils" of Korean society). By the late 1990's, South Korea was taking in up to 50 percent of the world's subcontracted animation. AKOM at one point employed more than 1,700 people.
Today, AKOM employs just 150. Most of the South Korean animation industry has suffered a major slowdown, and a rising standard of living has made South Korea less of a bargain, as animation companies increasingly moved to the Philippines, Vietnam and North Korea. In addition, two-dimensional animation has fallen out of favor. Audiences are turning more often to three-dimensional animation films like Pixar's "Incredibles."
More seriously, perhaps, Korean animators did not learn how to tell their own stories, preferring to churn out others' tales. "Koreans' technique is O.K., but they don't know anything about creation," Mr. Shin said.
Recent Korean attempts at original animated stories have not done well at the box office. The $10 million science-fiction film "Wonderful Days" barely made $2 million. "My Beautiful Girl, Mari" and "Oseam," both Grand Prix winners at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (in 2002 and 2004), also barely made a blip at the Korean box office.
And it looks as if "Empress Chung," which also won a special prize at Annecy in 2003 and the top prize at the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival in 2004, did not escape that fate either, earning just $140,000 in its opening weekend (a highly competitive weekend nonetheless, with new releases like "Fantastic Four," "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" and "Welcome to Dongmakgol").
Mr. Shin has not finished working with North Korea, though. He said that both North and South Korea have agreed to produce his next project: a six-part animated series on Goguryeo, an ancient state that once occupied the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and much of Manchuria about 2,000 years ago. China recently created a furor in Korea when it claimed historical ownership of Goguryeo.
"I don't want to focus on where the land was; I don't want to make trouble," Mr. Shin said. "But it is a fantastic story."
Meanwhile, here's a news anchor who blogs. Eh, it's not Teeveepad, but it's getting there...
An Anchor by Evening, a Blogger Any Time
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: August 25, 2005
He was the first anchor to take over a network evening newscast in the 21st century, so it was probably inevitable that Brian Williams would begin channeling his inner Gawker by getting his own daily blog.
While Mr. Williams is careful not to traffic in gossip or observations that might breach his journalistic objectivity on matters like the course of the war in Iraq, his dispatches for what is known as "The Daily Nightly" (on nightly.msnbc.com) are striking in two main respects. One is the light he periodically sheds, in real time, on deliberations among his "NBC Nightly News" colleagues, including their disagreements on the evolving lineup of that night's newscast. The other is the criticism he occasionally levels at himself and the program when he feels either has come up short.
"About last night's broadcast: immediately after we got off the air it was clear (based on my own gut, those whose opinions I respect, and viewer response) that we had missed the mark on two elements," he wrote, under the heading "Morning Mea Culpa," at 12:05 p.m. on Aug. 18. He went on to describe a series titled "Pain at the Pump," which had sought to answer the basic question of why gasoline prices vary wildly, even on the same street.
"We called the dynamic 'maddening' - and I'm afraid our attempt at an answer might have been equally maddening," he wrote, before adding, a few sentences later, "While the segment was the work of some our most talented folks ... I fully accept the ultimate blame for any miscommunication." He also took "full responsibility" for the intermittent failure of a search tool on the MSNBC Web site, to which he had directed viewers as a means to find the cheapest gas in their neighborhoods.
For several years, newscasts - on both the broadcast networks and cable - have sought to stoke the interest of viewers with mass messages sent via e-mail describing that night's program. As a logical extension, CBS News will introduce a new Web site next month that will feature an ombudsman charged with, among other tasks, answering viewer questions about the workings of the news division.
Meanwhile, a fledgling group of cable hosts - including Greta Van Susteren of Fox News - have begun their own blogs. (Hers is "Gretawire," reachable through foxnews.com.)
But none of the Big 3 anchors who dominated network news for more than two decades - including Peter Jennings of ABC, who occasionally defended an editorial decision by mass e-mail - sought to do what Mr. Williams has been attempting since his blog went up, with little fanfare, on May 31: to communicate with his audience more informally, sometimes several times a day, in a voice that is effectively unfiltered.
"There is no better way to say this than to whip out a cliché from the old cliché bag or drawer," Mr. Williams said in an interview. "We are trying to lift the veil. We're trying to expose ourselves as a collection of humans grappling with how to spend our precious 22 minutes each night."
"I said to my wife," he added, " 'I don't have a therapist. I have my blog.' "
Mr. Williams and his colleagues (who sometimes post their own entries) have been motivated to show a little leg at least in part because of a financial reality of the news business: though the three broadcast newscasts still draw an average of more than 20 million viewers a night, they have been losing hundreds of thousands of viewers each year. As it has for other businesses, the Web offers a fresh marketing opportunity - in this case, a chance to lure younger people who might be thirsting for a little inside baseball.
In that quest, Mr. Williams has managed to captivate at least one influential viewer. He is Brian Stelter, whose own blog - a compendium of the daily doings in television news (tvnewser.com) - reads as if it were written by a grizzled veteran, not, as is the case, by a 19-year-old junior at Towson University in Maryland.
On 10 occasions over the last three months, Mr. Stelter has provided links to "The Daily Nightly" on his own blog. Never mind that at this early stage, Mr. Stelter receives about as many page views, or entries called up on his site, in a weekday (about 27,000) as "The Daily Nightly" does in about a week.
"It makes me want to watch the evening news, and I haven't watched in years," Mr. Stelter said in an interview. "It's so honest. Sometimes I'll wonder why he's allowed to tell us what he's telling us."
Mr. Williams - who at 46 is more than twice Mr. Stelter's age - said that he had struggled at times to find a tone that did not have the "coat of polish" that his words might in a "Nightly News" script.
His inaugural posting, at 4:20 p.m. on May 31, provided little more than a recitation of that night's newscast - a head's up that "The Daily Nightly" has provided every weekday since.
But as he has grown more comfortable, Mr. Williams has also begun posting musings on the editorial process that, he says, are virtually stream-of-consciousness and copy edited only lightly.
On June 23 at 4:09 p.m., for example, under the heading "Debating the Rundown," Mr. Williams wrote: "During our editorial meeting (which I will politely call a boisterous and vigorous exchange of views between colleagues) we debated the competing merits of our two lead story candidates: the changing administration position on the insurgency in Iraq, and today's Supreme Court decision on private property."
Mr. Williams then identified particular colleagues by name, and the positions they staked out. The reader was left with a cliffhanger, the matter unresolved. Only at 6:23 p.m., seven minutes before he went on the air, did Mr. Williams take to his blog to write, "And the lead is ... the Supreme Court decision."
And then, Mr. Williams's online alter ego provided a "billboard" or "tease" to the correspondent who would deliver that report by introducing him in a way that Mr. Williams's stentorian, on-air persona never would.
He called him "Pete 'no relation that we know of' Williams."
