South Park Studios:
No Walk in the Park
It doesn’t get much more serious than South Park. Not that the show is dull or somber. It simply has the most manic production schedule of any animated series on television — probably ever. “We work between 100 and 120 hours in a seven-day week to deliver the episodes,” says Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles. “We’re moving unbelievably fast right out of the gate.”
Consider that an understatement. The South Park staff has been known to work around the clock — for nearly 24 hours — to turn out a show. And they don’t produce any shows ahead of time. Every new episode is delivered the day it airs. Why adhere to such a frantic production schedule? South Park wouldn’t be as funny or as remarkable if it wasn’t timely. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show’s creators and chief authors, need the ability to spoof yesterday’s presidential news conference or parody Britney Spears’ latest hairdo. They demand the creative freedom to mock any celebrity, politician or fad almost instantly.
To get that freedom the duo has built an audio/video studio that’s driven by a few dozen Macs and a massive render farm. Their team can hammer out a show from storyboard draft to broadcast final in-house in a matter of days. It’s a full-fledged animation factory, one of the few in the world that’s capable of producing a weekly animated series without hang-ups. “We have very complex stuff that needs to be done very fast and we need to know that we can trust the machines to handle whatever we throw at them without crumbling,” says JJ Franzen, technical director at South Park Studios. “That’s why we use Macs.”
Living Paper
Before there was a studio full of Macs, there was, of course, construction paper. “The show is based on construction paper, which was used for the pilot,” says Eric Stough, animation director at South Park. “All the pieces had to be cut out of construction paper. When we wanted to scale a character, we had to cut new pieces.” There’s no way the crew could snip enough paper to make 14 shows a season — not without hiring several elementary schools to do the cutouts. So they did their best to mimic the look and feel of that original pilot using SGI workstations.
“Matt and Trey designed the whole construction paper look,” says Stough. “It was crude and simple placement animation. But it made the characters come to life just by bumping them naturally. When you moved a character’s arm, the body moved a little too.”
To duplicate that analog jumpiness today, the animation crew employs Adobe Photoshop and Maya. “It’s incredibly fast,” says Stough. “It used to take three months to do a show. We’ve gotten it down to six days.” The animators scan the original construction paper characters and backgrounds. “We have a 10-year library of props and backgrounds and characters that we recycle and reuse,” says Stough. Those scanned images can be used as textures in Maya. The 3D modeling application can easily duplicate the physics of working in the real world with paper. “With Maya, we have puppets now and they’re grouped together as if they were glued together,” says Stough. “It’s kind of like a virtual camera stand in a computer. But instead of using a computer to make the animation smooth, the artist has to go in and make it jumpy.”
It sounds straightforward, but a lot of work goes into reproducing the signature South Park style. “Whenever we bring a new animator or technical director on board they have to go through a pretty lengthy training process,” says Agnone. “The show may look pretty simple to the rest of the world, but it’s tough to produce.”
But that classic South Park style hasn’t remained static. It has evolved, taking on new technology. Today South Park has hyper-real weather effects, thanks to Motion. “We used to use a snow wheel cutout in Maya,” says Stough. “We’d just rotate it and that was our weather. Now we use Motion, which allows us to bring the snow down and allow it to be a little more natural.” And when things go awry in South Park, Motion is the best tool for the job. “We’ve leaned on Motion for explosions and fire,” says Stough. “It’s really our special-effects tool.”
