Ministry of Education Art Trainee's Work Attracts Much Attention on YouTube

Recently a stop-motion short film - DEADLINE post-it- posted on YouTube received nearly 200,000 hits in a few days. It even attracted attention from big firms such as Microsoft, CNN Hong Kong and various advertising agencies, which hope to cooperate with or hire the filmmaker. Liu Bang-yao, the maker of this original short film, was chosen as one of the trainees in the Digital Media Group of the 2008 Ministry of Education Scholarship for Overseas Study in Arts and Design Program.

Chosen as one of the trainees of the program, Liu went to study in the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) in the US. Concept Development, a course he took at the college was the inspiration behind the film. The instructor showed many advertisements and short films in the classroom to encourage students'originality. In the all English-speaking environment, Liu came into contact with lots of information not readily accessible in Taiwan (including the viewing of many websites that were animation-oriented). Though stop motion animation has been employed by many, no one had ever combined stop motion animation with real persons. Liu used indispensable post-its as the source material.

Liu spent 3 months working on the film. He spent 4 days taking pictures and used more than 6,000 post-its. To complete the film, he then used projection techniques to complete the project. Then he sent the film to the animation competition of the 2009 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. One of the rules of the competition was that all entries must be uploaded to YouTube. Once uploaded, Liu's work unexpectedly attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers and international firms. We are convinced Liu's talent will earn himself and Taiwan much more attention in the future.

The MOE Scholarship for Overseas Study in Arts and Design Program aims to cultivate art and design talents of an international standard and to establish a long-term international cooperative training mechanism by providing financial assistance to talented students with potential in the product design, digital media and graphic design areas. Since 2005, the Ministry has openly selected the schools responsible for the program and made plans to cooperate with top-class foreign schools and firms. Through study camps eligible students are selected. Each student selected enjoys financial assistance - NT$1.2-2.0 million each - comparable to that enjoyed by those passing the exam to study abroad at the government's expense. In 2008, 19 were selected to enroll in the program after being screened by a study camp and by foreign schools. They now finished their study and returned to Taiwan in August-September 2009. We hope trainees leaving Taiwan in 2009 to study abroad will make good use of this opportunity and look forward to seeing trainees return to Taiwan in October 2008 to present what they have learned at a press conference in October 13 2009.

The film DEADLINE post-it can be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWM0FNPZSs