What is South Park?
South Park is a well-known animated sit-com that is well known for its dark humour, satirical elements, immature instances and overall crude language. It has sparked numerous awards and banning in several countries since its debut in August 1997. South Park is a love-hate show; you either love it, or despise it.
The Technique
South Park's animation was greatly inspired by the cut-out segments of Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which the creators were fans. In the original pilot, construction paper and slow, precise movements were used in a stop-animation type animation. The entirety of the pilot episode (22 minutes est.) took over three months to complete, and this was just due to the sheer amount of movements while trying to maintain a smooth frame rate for the animation to be presented in.
More recent episodes have seen the use of standard computer animation with the concept of maintaining a similar design to the original pilot while reducing the time of production drastically.
The simple anatomy of the characters involves standard shapes such as circles, squares etc. and the use of a variety of primary colours to maintain a bright feel. The characters are purposely moved in a jerk-like way to try and maintain the original look from the pilot; in the pilot the animators kept nudging the pieces around and therefore the actual characters had a jerk-like animation. The original characters from the pilot are still used in today's episodes, as the pieces were scanned into CorelDRAW and used as separate structures that can be bought into the program with ease, severely reducing the production time needed to create a single episode. The legacy from the pilot is always with the show.
South Park is a well-known animated sit-com that is well known for its dark humour, satirical elements, immature instances and overall crude language. It has sparked numerous awards and banning in several countries since its debut in August 1997. South Park is a love-hate show; you either love it, or despise it.
The Technique
South Park's animation was greatly inspired by the cut-out segments of Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which the creators were fans. In the original pilot, construction paper and slow, precise movements were used in a stop-animation type animation. The entirety of the pilot episode (22 minutes est.) took over three months to complete, and this was just due to the sheer amount of movements while trying to maintain a smooth frame rate for the animation to be presented in.
More recent episodes have seen the use of standard computer animation with the concept of maintaining a similar design to the original pilot while reducing the time of production drastically.
The simple anatomy of the characters involves standard shapes such as circles, squares etc. and the use of a variety of primary colours to maintain a bright feel. The characters are purposely moved in a jerk-like way to try and maintain the original look from the pilot; in the pilot the animators kept nudging the pieces around and therefore the actual characters had a jerk-like animation. The original characters from the pilot are still used in today's episodes, as the pieces were scanned into CorelDRAW and used as separate structures that can be bought into the program with ease, severely reducing the production time needed to create a single episode. The legacy from the pilot is always with the show.