Wednesday 28 October 2009

How tough is it to animate South Park ?

South Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network. Ok, you may probably already know this.

South Park has become a huge success around the world. The look of the show seems pretty basic. In this predominantly two dimensional world, Trey & Matt originally animated the show using card construction cut-outs and stop-motion video. This is a very time consuming process and now, with the aid of computers, the process is a lot lot quicker. However, the show still keeps intact the basic look and feel that it did during it's original airing.

Much of South Park's success is due mostly to the ideas and script writing than the sophistication of the animation. If the animation were changed, it would probably ruin the whole feel of the show and there would probably be uproar!

So how hard is it for an individual on a budget of near zero to create an animation of the same level of South Park? Granted, anything of any decent length is going to take quite a lot of time to produce.

I decided to quickly see if could make something pretty basic in limited time using what I had available. I didn't have any cardboard cut-outs to use, but just really a laptop. Using the basic Paint package and Windows Movie maker, I made the below short and very basic animation.



Yes, it will not win many awards, and was created in under an hour. It shows though, if you have quite a bit of time on your hands, it would be possible to create something quite good. And of course... there are much better software packages out there than Paint and Movie Maker!

Kick Ass!




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