A look behind the six-day marathon to create one episode of South Park. Keep in mind that one Simpsons episode takes 3 months to produce:
Each episode of “South Park” comes to life in 6 days, start to finish — a crazy pace for an animated series
Even crazier: each episode arrives at Comedy Central in New York via uplink somewhere between 6:30 and 8:30 PM on Wednesday, to be shown that night at 10 PM.
Cutting it close? Even a production as relatively simple as a late-night talk show, leaves more like five hours to air than three.
And because work proceeds on each episode until the very last minute, an awful lot of things have to go right, in very short order, with virtually no margin for error.
It’s not just that the script has to be completed in time for voice recording, creating and rendering animation (including lip sync), color correction, visual effects, scoring and audio post. It’s that the script keeps changing to respond to the world’s most current events, as well as the perfectionism of the show’s creators. Which means that everything downstream from the script keeps changing too.
Their perfectionism is paying off. …
Not bad for a cartoon show about four foul-mouthed boys intended to look like it was animated from construction paper cut-outs. [link]
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