Panda Show Time--RollCoCo Design Unlimited's Digital Dynamism

Like many small companies, RollCoCo Design Unlimited occupies a patch of space within the offices of a larger information technology company. From chairman to artistic director to managers to animation designers, the RollCoCo team are all squeezed together in a space of less than 35 square meters including gangways. But at a rent of just NT$30,000 a month including water and electricity, financially this is a very sensible choice for these Internet workers who often have to work through the night.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

Since October last year, when RollCoCo took two awards in one of the series of digital content competitions put on by the Digital Content Industry Promotion Office of the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Industrial Development Bureau, the number of visitors seeking them out has increased. To date they have received backing from three venture capital companies, and when Jenny Wu, RollCoCo's international affairs director and one of its founding members, recently returned from a family visit in the US, she brought back the good news that people from the Hollywood animation world are interested in collaboration.

The leader of this little team is RollCoCo's 30-something chairman-Chauven Tarng. His warm, cultured, smooth-skinned white face still has a somewhat childish air, and in his speech there is none of the arrogant self-confidence of most webgeeks. Nevertheless, when the award-winning animation prototypes PandaMonium and Eternal Gaze, which are only three minutes and one minute long respectively, begin to play, Tarng's gaze is fixed on the screen and his eyes sparkle.

Eternal Gaze tells the story of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. On the screen we see only the eccentric artist, who spends all his days immersed in his own world of fantasy, engaged in a silent but intense dialogue and struggle with the works of art in his mind. Every image in Eternal Gaze is a modernist painting in a style reminiscent of Matisse, and on a more abstract level this also creates a behind-the-scenes dialogue and struggle between the filmmaker and the artist character. The interplay of multiple perspectives creates a bizarre and interesting tension.

Eternal Gaze is conceived as an art education film. This is a small niche market with extremely high quality demands, but fortunately there are fewer competitors.

Then they change the tape, to play a film in a very different style: the other prize-winning work, PandaMonium. The moment the cartoon "Pipi Pandas" appear on the screen, their appealing appearance of their plump, round bodies with little ears and noses and bean-shaped black patches around their eyes, and the accessible adventure theme, sweep away the gloomy mood of the previous film.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

To talk about PandaMonium, you have to trace back the history of RollCoCo's development.

After Chauven Tarng returned to Taiwan in 1997 on finishing his studies in the US, he first started working in his own field of cinema. But the cinema industry was in a slump, so Tarng turned his hand to TV advertising, website design and art festival planning, and recently has even done campaign website production and operation for political figures such as Taipei City mayoral candidate Lee Ying-yuan.

RollCoCo's artistic director Tsao Chih-wei, who received the best artistic design prize at the 35th Golden Horse Awards for his work on Flowers of Shanghai, has close and long-standing connections with directors Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien and with Paper Windmill Theater. Long collaboration with these famous directors has helped shape the RollCoCo team's style, which is characterized by a high artistic vision and highly polished images.

The most successful of RollCoCo's many works is the PiPi Panda set of Internet cartoon characters. The well known Taiwanese Internet portal Yam.com has even given the pandas their own web page, with a collection of animated greetings cards to download for free. "Back then the Korean characters MashiMaro the rabbit and the 'Funny Love' couple Pucca and Garu were all the rage," recounts Chauven Tarng. "MashiMaro was not published in books or made into a cinema film, yet he took the Internet by storm just thanks to his sassy, cool image, and later made big sales on merchandise such as stationery and clothing. Just the licensing fees for Taiwan were NT$100 million!" Tarng says that it is no wonder that everyone working in Internet animation hoped that they too could create an overnight success like MashiMaro.

But Taiwan is not Korea, and although the PiPi Pandas helped raise RollCoCo's profile, the advertising income of a few thousand NT dollars that they generated was not enough even to cover costs. So at the suggestion of Hsu Jung-hung, formerly Yam's and marketing director, Tarng built on the PiPi Panda idea and "blundered" into the field of animated film, to create the animated drama PandaMonium.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

PandaMonium starts with an epic Bible story. The film tells how a panda overhears God commanding Noah to build an ark to escape the great flood. To save themselves, the whole panda tribe set to work and build their own ark, but amid raging winds and lashing rain, a huge wave throws their ark right out into space. The pandas struggle to hook onto the big ark. Their struggle gives rise to a story lost in the mists of time.

God has given Noah a staff of power, which will restore spring and life to the earth if he thrusts it into the soil after the floodwaters recede. But by misfortune the staff is carried off into space by the pandas' boathooks. The pandas land on the doughnut-shaped planet Caron, on which there are six strange fortresses including TVBean Island, Wisdom Village, Olympic City and the Dark Territory.

Why did the RollCoCo team choose Noah's ark as the background? Chauven Tarng says with a laugh that his home is in Hsichih, and the frequent floods there put the fear of God in him, so he naturally brought floods into the story. But PandaMonium was not just his own idea, but the joint creative work of the whole team.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

"The design of the main characters was already settled. But what sort of personality would characters looking like that have? What sort of things might happen to characters with those personalities? And how would they react?"-Jenny Wu, one of the main driving forces behind PandaMonium, recalls the process two years ago as the story took shape.

At each of their twice-weekly brainstorming sessions, the six or seven team members would all sit together and make up the story in round-robin style, each adding to it in turns. Someone asked, why can't the pandas come back to earth in the end? But someone else worried that if they did, it would be difficult to tie the story back in with the Bible story. How many pandas should there be altogether? How should they relate to each other? During this constant exchange of ideas and comments, the group would often erupt into laughter or praise, but of course there were also times when everyone would jeer "Rubbish!" or "Take it back, take it back!" Throughout, the lead artistic designer Kulu Ku would turn the fruits of their galloping imaginations into whiteboard sketches of scenes and the characters' actions.

"At RollCoCo, the team always comes first. We believe that several heads are better than one, so we don't emphasize individuality or encourage people to go it alone," says Jenny Wu. You have to be happy to express your creativity within the team, and be able to put up with others' sarcasm or criticism. You may even be forced to drop an idea or make compromises, and for proud and ambitious newcomers, this is usually a tough challenge. Often someone will go into a huff and not speak to someone else all day. But because the senior team members have got what it takes in terms of both creativity and leadership ability, actually very few people get so fed up that they leave.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

In art, creativity is everything, and you either have it or you don't. What is the source of creativity? Jenny Wu has noticed that apart from individual talent and sensitivity, the more someone has traveled, the richer their experience, the longer their "antennae" and the more they are in the habit of thinking deeply, then the more likely they are to be an endless fount of good ideas. But Kulu Ku believes that the key to creativity is not letting one's thinking get caught in a rut.

Ku quotes one of his favorite animated greeting cards as an example: Humans don't like to have dark rings around their eyes, but in the card a beautiful young female panda is unhappy because she doesn't have black patches around hers. But in the top panda tells to wear dark glasses, and this allows her to regain her confidence.

"Don't be afraid to be different from others, If you make the effort, anyone can win other people's approval and friendship in their own unique way!" explains Ku, who recently became a father.

Of course, in the long process of story development, the plot may get stuck in the doldrums or go up a series of dead ends, so that there is no choice but to go back and start again. And when the prototype story is finished they still have to pass it to scriptwriter David Yip in Hong Kong to write it into a proper script and make the final decisions and changes.

The seemingly endless process of grinding into shape, "may grind down a few 'Wunderkinder,' but it ensures that the story will be more popular and saleable," says Kulu Ku. He avers that it is precisely because the core leaders at RollCoCo come from a cinema background that, having seen in the last few years how a succession of highly individual and artistic Taiwanese-made films have increasingly become box-office poison, so that in the end no-one is interested in local art films, they are careful not to fall into the same trap.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

As well as using a collective approach to give their stories greater compatibility and popular appeal, the team also use the Internet as a proving ground. When the lead characters of PandaMonium, the PiPi Panda warriors, were first launched on the web they were a big hit, and the few people who did criticize them would be jumped on by other netizens. But a year ago when RollCoCo launched another set of cartoon characters called CoCoPlay, featuring four cheeky children wearing animal-head masks, they immediately drew adverse comments such as "Not funny!" or "Kill them off, don't make any more!" so they naturally stopped developing the characters.

Chauven Tarng says frankly that reason RollCoCo was able to succeed with PandaMonium at its first attempt was precisely because the judges included film industry representatives, who emphasized the questions of who would buy the work under review, and why its makers thought it would earn money. It was because they applied these criteria that PandaMonium, which was deliberately designed to have numerous selling points, was so well received.

Also, although RollCoCo is small, it has a thoroughly international team: Jenny Wu grew up in the United States, having been sent there as a young child to go to school there; scriptwriter David Yip is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong; designer Sam Chen, the independent producer of Eternal Gaze, which took the other prize for RollCoCo, is currently filming in America; and as for artistic director Tsao Chih-wei, who has recently been busy on another project for RollCoCo-a Franco-Taiwanese arts festival project that has him shuttling back and forth between Taipei and Paris-he too is an all-round artistic talent with a richly international perspective.

At a time when film and TV companies in Taiwan are all stressing the need to advance into the international arena on the basis of "Chinese color," Chauven Tarng shows little interest in peddling nativism, exoticism or "East meets West" themes.

Citing Journey to the West as an example, Tarng says, "To foreigners, it is just an adventure story about a man, a pig, a monkey and a monster. What's the difference between that and the Japanese story of Momotaro?" Tarng observes that to make such a story shallower and simpler so that it is accessible to foreign audiences, who have to start from scratch in understanding it, and yet still enable people to see the depth of cultural history bound up with it, is an impossible task. Part of the reason why PandaMonium found favor with the competition judges is that half the panel were foreign experts who were especially receptive to this fantasy story that is not colored by a particular culture.

With youth, energy and bold creativity, a little team can take on the big boys. Seated, center,is RollCoCo Design Unlimited's chairman Chauven Tarng. (below:) The seven panda warriors of PandaMonium.

At present scripts have been completed for a PandaMonium series with 13 episodes of 22 minutes each, and the detailed work such as a full storyboard has been completed for the first episode. Because the core competencies of the RollCoCo team are in planning and design-character design, plot development and scene design-the detailed artwork and filming needs to be contracted out.

The cost of producing a complete animated film is so high-an estimated US$200,000 per episode of PandaMonium, or several tens of millions of NT dollars for a full series-that it is way beyond the resources of a small start-up company like RollCoCo. Chauven Tarng admits that because of this he is still "evading" the issue of actual filming. The project has been "gestating" for more than two years now, and the child is taking ever clearer shape, but when will it really be born? This is still an unknown quantity.

To overcome this impasse and dispel the anxiety it causes, and to ensure that their work has not been in vain, RollCoCo set up another company, TVbean, to concentrate in the management and licensing of the PiPi Panda product range. As well as supplying downloadable animations for mobile phones to telecoms companies in Taiwan and Japan, in December they also signed a licensing agreement with a mainland Chinese telecoms operator. Other projects they are working on include designs to go on children's scooters, and a six-volume fairytale picture book series.

By turning the orientation from the creative process to commercialization, the establishment of TVbean has gradually expanded the company's field of activity, on the one hand by its becoming an agency for visual artists, and on the other by strengthening the company's back-end filming and production capabilities.

"We hope we can build a bridge between creativity and business, to assist original creators in developing and extending their work," says Lin Hsiu-lu. Lin, the manager of TVbean's licensing department, has been with the company less than three months, and brims with the initiative and self-confidence of the 1970s generation, says that artists who have contracts with TVbean include Cola King, Red Capsule and Viva Girl, who are all currently very popular on the Internet. In Taiwan this is a new way of working, but in fact in other countries it is an established, mature and essential part of the art scene.

Looking back at the foundation his team has built over the last five years, Chauven Tarng quotes the words of Walt Disney: "Remember, it all started with a mouse!" Let us hope that with tender loving care, the magic beans planted by RollCoCo's pandas can also grow into a mighty beanstalk!