It’s the last day of 2016. Hope you had a good year!
Golden Sunset at Tamsui in Taiwan. Photo credit: kkmakesandbakes (my wife). Taken with Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with M.Zuiko 25mm f1.8 lens.
Glad the year’s drawing to a close. Best wishes for the New Year!
The Mate 9 is Huawei’s flagship phablet boasting the fabulous camera from P9 that was co-developed with Leica and now improved, a fast Kirin 960 processor and Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.0 user interface. Price in Singapore: S$898.
My take: The Huawei Mate 9 is another winner from Huawei. The Android 7 flagship phablet works swiftly as a smartphone and has a fabulous camera that churns out wonderfully toned black and white snapshots. Fantastic for monochrome shooters that want Leica-like photos without any post-editing.
The 5.9-inch smartphone has dual SIM slots capable of supporting 4G and 3G networks.
The Huawei Mate 9 ships with 4GB RAM and 64GB memory, and you can use the secondary SIM card slot to add up to 256GB from a microSD card.
Have been trying out the Huawei Mate 9 since its launch & availability in Singapore last month. Was curious to see whether the camera performance of the Mate 9 had improved over the P9, which had impressed me when I tried it (see the P9 photos here).
With the demise of Samsung’s Galaxy Note7, the Huawei Mate 9 is a strong candidate to take up the mettle left by the Korean flagship phablet.
The phone sports a Type-C USB socket – an adaptor to convert into a regular mini-USB is included in the box – and has a 4000mAh battery that can be SuperCharged for a day’s usage within 20 minutes.
I brought along the Mate 9 when I went on vacation in Taiwan to put it through the grind of daily usage, and to take some photos with its fabulous camera (see the Mate 9 photos here).
The highlights
Here is a sampling of the art used in this year’s N.E.mation! competition.
Simple but innovative use of ink cartoons on plastic cups for use in stop-motion animation. Rotate the outer cup to get different facial expressions or different stages of a chin-up exercise. Prop by N.E. HEH HEH (#NE11C09).
To many, N.E.mation! 11 is first and foremost an animation competition – with animation themes based on the National Education message of building a strong and resilient country that can defend itself against adversity and external threats.
![My favourite is this finger puppet of a soldier sewn by [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01). Other finger puppets included civilian clothes like those worn by the Sylvanian family of toy figurines.](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88740461/images1612/161209ne11artFinger1638x2048.jpg "My favourite is this finger puppet of a soldier sewn by [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01). Other finger puppets included civilian clothes like those worn by the Sylvanian family of toy figurines.")
My favourite is this finger puppet of a soldier sewn by [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01). Other finger puppets included civilian clothes like those worn by the Sylvanian family of toy figurines.
![Cut-out pop-up park to be used as background for the animation. The cylinder can be rotated to simulate movement of foreground objects in the animation. By [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01).](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88740461/images1612/161209ne11artBackground1638x2048.jpg "Cut-out pop-up park to be used as background for the animation. The cylinder can be rotated to simulate movement of foreground objects in the animation. By [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01).")
Cut-out pop-up park to be used as background for the animation. The cylinder can be rotated to simulate movement of foreground objects in the animation. By [BlankSpace] (#NE11C01).
So a lot of emphasis is focused on the animation techniques used and how slick and accomplished the completed animation looks.
MADEit (#NE11C08) animates the images on a $10 Singapore bill, adding their own elements to it in their animation.
N.E.mation! 11 bestows upon participating teams the skills of digital animation.
Finding Sanity (#NE11C05) draws their artwork on a computer for their 2D 8-bit animation. I like the patchwork look.
More than that, the competition also brings out the artistic talents in every participating individual.
Passionfruit (#NE11C10) draws their artwork digitally on a graphics tablet.
We met with one of the Top Ten teams for this year’s N.E.mation! competition – “Passionfruit” from Evergreen Secondary School.
Passionfruit’s animation, “Shields of Singapore”, is now available for viewing and voting. You can find out the four methods of voting your three favourite clips here.
N.E.mation! 11 Team “Passionfruit” from Evergreen Secondary School. From left: Wong Xin Yuan Mabel, Maybelle Ong Hui Leng, Yolanda Low Jing Xuan, Pamela Lee (Li Ming Fang).
This team is the most passionate of the lot – seriously folks!
Leader of the bunch (of Passion fruits) – Mabel Wong Xin Yuan.
I could tell from talking with these four young ladies about the digital 2D animation that they have been working on for the past three weeks of production.
The title of their 1-minute animation is “Shields of Singapore”.
Using the allegory of an umbrella to express their main idea, the theme is that “Everyone is a shield of Singapore, no matter rain or shine”.
And this is embodied in what citizens do in their everyday lives, manifesting itself in how Singaporeans help one another in sticky situation and even in the littlest things – shielding one another from harm and giving a hand when needed.
We met with one of the Top Ten teams for this year’s N.E.mation! competition – N.E. HEH HEH from the Singapore Chinese Girls School (SCGS). Erin Tan reports.
N.E. HEH HEH’s animation, “Just A Little Something”, is now available for viewing and voting. You can find out the four methods of voting your three favourite clips here.
N.E.mation! 11 Team “N.E. HEH HEH” from Singapore Chinese Girls School (SCGS). From left: Wang Lei, Sarah Mak, Karen Nakajima and Michelle Khor.
N.E. HEH HEH is the only team from SCGS in the Top Ten teams in this year’s N.E.mation! 11.
Wang Lei, the Secondary Three team leader of N.E. HEH HEH, a bubbly art student who also drew life-like portraits of the entire team – see below.
The team members consist of two Secondary Three ladies, who keep the team anchored, and two Secondary Ones, who keep things light-hearted and fun.
The two Sec Three girls – Wang Lei and Sarah Mak – are veterans from the school’s N.E.mation! 9 Top Ten team two years ago!
They told me that their team name is a play on the evil laughter of the character Pap from the video game Undertale, and the name “N.E.mation”.
The product of these three weeks of production will be a 60-second animation, to bring to life the ideas and storyline they proposed during the earlier pitching and selection rounds.
We met with one of the Top Ten teams for this year’s N.E.mation! competition – “[Blank Space]” from Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School. Erin Tan reports.
[Blank Space]’s animation, “Our Five Fingers of Defence”, is now available for viewing and voting. You can find out the four methods of voting your three favourite clips here.
N.E.mation! 11 Team “[Blank Space]” from Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School. From left: Tan Jing Yi, Olivia Surrthi Ketheesan, Ng Hui Xin, and Nur Adilah Binte Jamaludin.
The team members are all from the same Secondary Two class.
They tell me they can never stop arguing with each other, yet they are able to work together in perfect harmony nonetheless.
Olivia Surrthi, Secondary Two, the tallest and supposedly the most mature of the group.
Their team name arose from not knowing what to name themselves, and so they came up with this creative name.
They say it has nothing to do at all with Taylor Swift’s song “Blank Space”, which became immensely popular two years ago when it was released.
After these three weeks of production are over, they will be required to submit a 60-second animation, the plot of which they have refined and perfected over the course of the selection rounds.
[Blank Space]’s animation revolves around a the imagery of a hand with five fingers – with each finger representing one of the five pillars of Total Defence – Military, Civil, Economic, Social, and Psychological Defence.
