When Comedy Central's South Park launched, the pilot episode and much of the first season was a
When Comedy Central's South Park launched, the pilot episode and much of the first season was animated on a bottom-dollar budget using a camera, some cut paper and stop motion methods. The childish, choppy animation style worked well to sell the idea of a comedy about kids acting like raunchy adults, but took a long time to produce from start to finish (roughly 3 weeks per episode, working full time) and a business where time is money, that latency could easily have killed the show. Wanting to improve production efficiency and avoid the telltale smooth movements of Flash animation, the studio made a rather unorthodox move: as of Season 5, South Park is now animated almost entirely in Autodesk Maya, a 3D animation package used prominently by studios like Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic. Maya’s stage-like setup allows South Park Studios to maintain the choppy art style associated with the show, while shortening the time it takes to animate an episode to as little as 3 days. -- source link
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