It Ain't Easy Making South Park Cheesy

The crude cut-out animations of Comedy Central's potty-mouthed animated sensation, South Park, seem like the height of a low-tech revolution in cartooning. In fact it took months of intensive R&D; and the experience of creating four episodes before the show's creators were able to make their high-end computer graphics tools produce the convincingly hand-made appearance they feel they've finally achieved.

"Alias is used for Jurassic Park and shit," says co-creator Matt Stone, still somewhat amazed at the level of computer-animation software at his disposal. Though the series was now-famously created by Stone and Trey Parker as a 5-minute video Christmas card using primitive stop-motion photography of construction-paper cut-outs - including "these little construction-paper mouths the size of your fingernail" - it soon became apparent that the process was insufficient to the demands of series television.

Using traditional methods for the Comedy Central pilot "took us forever, because it was 22 minutes long," Stone says. "It was hell on this earth." In order produce that much material every week, Stone says he and Parker had to "devise a system so 10 people could do it and it would all look like one hand."

This invisible teamwork is exactly what people have traditionally trained for years to do in cartoon factories like Disney, he points out, but in South Park's case, "the drug of choice was Alias on SGI workstations." Using a dozen animators on a dozen Silicon Graphics O2s, the team is now able to "pump out a show every three weeks." And all this while finishing production on the duo's unrelated live-action feature, Orgazmo, to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

Part of this efficiency is based on the fact that the show "never sees videotape." It exists entirely as media files exchanged over network, from all the phases of animation, to Avid editing, and up until the final tape is created for broadcast.

Moreover, though the denizens of South Park gambol in an unapologetically planar world, they are actually built with 3-D software, to preserve the slightly raised look of distinct pieces of paper.

If the series manages to survive this onslaught of technology while retaining the appearance of cut-outs dragged around the screen, it's probably because the lads have built a kind of digital version of their original process.

To create the digital models of the characters, the team scanned in the original construction paper shapes used in the pilot and then assigned those pieces to corresponding parts of the bodies. None of the motion is automated, either.

"Everything is moved manually across the screen," says Stone, "so it gets that organic jumpy look." But only this week, with the show's fourth episode, has the animation regained its original pulpy look. The first several, Stone says, still looked too "computerish."

That it took a few episodes to devolve properly is not entirely surprising since, admits Stone, their cartoon-construction system "is totally new" and was built from scratch over the past three months.

Related Wired Links:


MTV to Roll Out Cartoon Sushi
25.Jun.97

Computers are, Like, Inescapable, Beavis
20.Dec.96