The Making of the South Park WoW Episode

Via GameSetWatch, an interview with South Park Producer Frank Agnone, Tech Supervisor J. J. Franzen, and Director of Animation Eric Stough. The discussion, on the Machinima.com site, goes into a lot of detail on how the South Park WoW episode was made, their rationale for doing it, and the amount of assistance they received from Blizzard. From the article: "Q: How long did it take to capture, puppeteer, and edit all the WOW footage? JJ: Uhm... A really really long time. We decided early on to treat the in-game capture sessions as regular film shoots. Our 'set' ended up being the lobby of the studio we produce South Park in. We rented 12 PCs, set up a bunch of folding tables, and were basically good to go. I decided that it would be best to capture on a Mac, since we would be able to capture directly to a quicktime file, which would make getting the captured footage onto the editing system a lot quicker. So, I hauled my shiny new MacPro out into the lobby and spent the next two weeks in a much bigger, if less private, new office. We had 5 'shoot' days, the first on the 20th of Sept. which lasted about 3-5 hours. The next was on the 26th of Sept. which also lasted about 4-5 hours., and then we shot almost every other day up to the last few days of production Monday and Tuesday were full days, with the last day going from 10am Tuesday morning to around 3am Wednesday morning the 3rd of Oct,, the day the episode aired."

Re:Close

[tgtanman]

FTA: "We have been producing our episodes in this fashion for years, routinely finishing within 12 hours of the episode going on the air."

Re:Close

[BigDork1001]

That's cutting it really close. Anyone know if that's usual for the production of an South Park Episode?

From TFA: "We have been producing our episodes in this fashion for years, routinely finishing within 12 hours of the episode going on the air."

So yes, that is usual for a South Park episode.

Re:Close

[c_forq]

I've heard the main reason they chose to do that is so they can stay extremely relevant. For example they can make fun of events within a couple days of it happening.

Re:How they did it:

[DreadfulGrape]

"...so myopic that they cannot phantom anything outside of the game..."

Definitely a 5-point post, but I think the word you're looking for in the last paragraph is fathom. Which, in addition to being a unit of nautical measurement equal to six feet, is also a verb meaning to penetrate the truth, to comprehend, to understand.