South Park Studios: No Walk in the Park
South Park’s signature animation style is only part of the show’s success. Parker and Stone’s stinging wit really bring the cardboard characters to life. And that wit is fueled by current events, which are by their very nature, current. So production has to be blisteringly quick. “The schedule starts on a Thursday, six days prior to air,” says Agnone. “We get the script and then the machine starts to churn. Trey and Matt go into the booth and record the dialog, then the audio editors cut it.” Simultaneously, a team is sketching out storyboards based on the script and animators are designing characters, locations and props for the episode.
Then the lip sync department gets a crack at it, melding audio with character movement. Animators put it all together and the editorial department cuts the episode for broadcast using Macs running Avid. “It sounds like a straightforward process, but it’s always chaotic and we’re working under really tight timeframes and turnarounds,” says Agnone. Parker and Stone often have edits mere hours before the show is due at the network. “This schedule really developed to give Matt and Trey the creative flexibility to stay current, to touch on topics in the news. We’ve really custom-built this studio so we can turn around an episode every six days.”
That studio now includes a 120-processor render farm, more than 30 Mac workstations and almost 10 terabytes of Xserve RAID storage space. “We put together a back-end render farm that can handle a full-length film, no problem,” says Agnone.
Power to Play
South Park Studios has always had a heavy-duty render farm and powerful workstations. “When we first started we were using SGI workstations and PowerAnimator,” says Franzen. “It was one of the few packages that could give us the cardboard style.” Those stations were chained to a 54-processor render farm that could crank out 10 to 15 shots an hour. That’s not too shabby, but Parker and Stone needed more speed to stay on top of the latest world events. Franzen decided to run Windows machines and Maya, but the setup didn’t last long.
“There were times when Maya would crash on the Windows workstations,” says Franzen. “The entire system had to be rebooted, which would take three or four minutes. It simply happened too often and wasted too much time.” When Maya was released for the Mac, Franzen made the switch. “Mac OS X is UNIX-based and in a UNIX or Linux system, of course, when an application crashes, only the application crashes, not the whole computer.”
The team also needed a system that their animators could quickly master. “Apple is known in the industry as being very user friendly and when you’re making a big switchover, that factors in,” says Agnone. “With Apple and Mac OS X, in-house production could make the transition easily.”
The new Mac workstations are fast and reliable. They’re also coupled to a 120-processor (AMD Athlon) Linux render farm. “When we made the switch to Maya on the Mac we were able to use Linux-based boxes for the render farm,” says Franzen. “And we effectively doubled the amount of shots we can do.” Now the system can spit out 30 or more shots an hour. Those shots — and every element of animation — are stored on an 8.5-terabyte Xserve RAID running Xsan. The team also keeps 1.5 terabytes around for everyday processing and another terabyte for rendering. The new system can definitely keep up with the crew’s insane production schedule.
Lead Animator Jack Shih
Working at South Park Studios may seem taxing and even exhausting, but the production crew wouldn’t have it any other way. “Matt and Trey established a great atmosphere from the very beginning,” says Agnone. “As a result there are a lot of hardworking people here who are devoted to South Park and we all get to do a lot of laughing in the midst of the long hours. It’s got to be the best job in Hollywood.”
“There are time when we are buried in our 120-hour work weeks when we just need to catch a breath,” he continues. “But every Wednesday night, after working a very difficult six days, we get new gratification from a new episode going on the air. The positive feedback we get from our families and the media world is overwhelming and those 120-hour weeks are paid off immediately.”
