South Park - Creative COW Magazine

“IT HITS THE FAN”
An inside look at TV’s longest week: the teamwork and technology
behind the Emmy Award-winning worldwide hit, “South Park”
Each episode of “South Park” comes to life in six
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, where delivery might
entail no more than walking across the same building
it’s taped in, 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
Tim Wilson “Timmeh!”
Boston, Massachusetts USA
the script keeps changing too.
Their perfectionism is paying off. Now in its twelfth
season, “South Park” has been nominated for 7 Emmy
Awards for Best Animated Program, winning in 2005
and 2006 — and just as this issue was wrapping, the
three-parter “Imaginationland” was awarded the 2007
Emmy for “Outstanding Animated Program
(For Programming
One Hour Or More).”
South Park has
also won a GLAAD
Award, an NAACP Image
Award, a CableACE
Award, and the prestigious
Peabody Award,
among others.
Not bad for a cartoon
show about four
foul-mouthed boys
intended to look like it
was animated from construction paper
cut-outs.
“I’d have finished this article a whole lot faster if I hadn’t kept stopping to watch
more episodes of ‘South Park,’” says Tim. Exhibit A: the article title and each of
the section headings is taken from an episode title. Pathetic.
EMMY is a registered trademark of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. All rights are reserved.
“PROFESSOR CHAOS”
Workflow at South Park Studios has evolved with
the sole purpose of giving creators and executive
producers Matt Stone and Trey Parker the room
to write, direct, add additional music to the work
of South Park’s composers, and if called for, to
write songs, in such little time.
Before attending the University of Colorado
where he met Matt, Trey studied at Boston’s
Berklee College of Music. His song “Blame Canada,”
co-written with Marc Shaiman for the movie
“South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut” was nominated
for an Academy Award for Best Song.
The two also provide voices for most of the
show’s male characters.
Supervising Producer Frank Agnone is the
keeper of the workflow for the sixty people who put
the show together. From the time that pages for the
next episode arrive early in the morning after the previous
one airs, he makes sure that a lot of things happen
simultaneously.
The basics are
traditional enough:
those early pages are
recorded, the dialog
is cut up and passed
to storyboard artists.
Editors start
building animatics
by cutting together
the storyboards and
dialog to start shaping
the scene.
Of course, even after the first pages arrive and
scene construction begins, nobody necessarily knows
where in the show it’s going to end up. The script
evolves as the week progresses: the final script is
generally in place around 2 AM Wednesday, about 12
hours before the show is uploaded for air.
Until then, the work carries on, scene by scene. As
editor David List notes, “It doesn’t matter so much to
us whether a scene is at the beginning or end, as far
as editorial is concerned. The challenge is more
for Matt and Trey as they build the story structure.
For us, it’s basically cutting. We know from
the beginning that there will be changes as we
go, but we’ve been doing this for so long that we
know how to keep moving.”
At the same time that Frank is working with
Trey to refine individual layouts, 3D modeling
begins. Those shots move very rapidly through
lip sync and into the hands of the animators.
“So it’s an ever changing formula,” says
Frank, “but ultimately it’s my responsibility to
make sure that the team of sixty people is staying
on schedule and we are hitting our deadlines
for Trey, hitting our video deadlines so that color
correction can happen on time, and then our audio
deadlines so that we’re making broadcasts
on time.”
“TWO DAYS BEFORE THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW”
Things get especially hairy on the last day: a 30-hour
stretch that begins early Tuesday morning on the way
to completion by Wednesday afternoon.
Picture lock comes in for a landing at 9 AM Wednesday
morning, when the video is recorded to tape and
sent out for final color correction. At the same time,
the final clean-up and re-conform from last-minute
edits gets sent through audio post one last time.
“Then the scramble is on for those guys to make
sure all of the proper dialog and ADR work is in place,”
says Frank. “Sound design for shots that are coming in
until that 9 AM hour on Wednesday morning are also
attended to, and then a mix begins.”
The mix comes together just as the color graded
picture comes back at 1 PM Pacific, when Frank pulls
the plug on any additional work. “If I’m lucky, I’m out
the door by 2 PM, sometimes 2:30, to our uplink facility
to start fibering the episode to New York. On average
the show arrives on the east coast between 6:30 and 7
PM [Eastern], and it’s on the air at 10 PM.
“We had a couple of shows in this last run where
I was getting the show there as close as 8:30 for a 10
o’clock broadcast.”
It’s difficult enough to keep track of all this as it’s
being described that it raises the obvious question:
8 September / October 2008 — Creative COW Magazine
Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008 9