Animation
 

Hello folks!
I have a great project coming up soon. It involves a lot of "South Park" like animation. Can anyone who knows tell me the procedure for shooting something like that?

Thanks
Michael Estepp

You know they don't do it by hand any more. They use Maya (3D animation but in 2D).

But if you are doing it like they did originally, you need a tabletop set up with a camera that can do frame by frame. Actually, you don't even need a video camera. You could do it with a digital still camera.

Stop Motion Pro is a great program for stop motion work. It works with DV and USB cameras I believe. I only got to try the demo but from what I saw it was excellent. This is if you want to do it the stop motion way (manually moving construction paper around, frame by frame).

Or you could animate moving construction paper on the computer.

Cel animation
 

Software's the way to do it - trying to precisely control your camera position and movement of paper/card/celophane is a nightmare.

There are quite a lot of tools around that let you paint and animate cel layers to create moire or less South Park styles. The following are worth a look:

Androme Creatoon - about £250, www.creatoon.com;
Digicel Flipbook - about £370, www.digicelinc.com;
Lost Marble Moho - about £60, www.lostmarble.com.

All the others I know of are in the £5000-£10000 range!

Regards,

Julian

I would go somewhere in between paper and single frame photography and completely computor generated.

Create your characters, sets, etc. out of paper. Then scan them into your PC, so that you have all of the basic characters and their different sides, poses, etc. The mouths with different phonetics will be seperate, like when the South Park kids made a Christmas cartoon... "Two frames of the oooo mouuth. Three frames of the..."

Then you can use photoshop and layer the scenes, complete with drop shadows. Export frames into Premiere's timeline, and you have animation.

RE
 

Is there any reason I can't use my current software, Vegas and After Effects? I also have access to maya, but don't have much practice on it.

Michael Estepp

Hey, that's a good idea! Do the visuals in After Effects and add the sound in Vegas. I've been studying After Effects for the past month, the 3D and animation features look perfect for that.

If you haven't already, check out the Tutorials at Adobe.com (you might have to register)

Here's some interesting links:

Intro to 3D example - very South Park like.

Here's another to get that the parallax effect for background mountains and forests.

Animation Tutorials at Adobe.com

Go over to my site and look at how I did my South Park Stephen character. Wrote a tutorial on how you could do the mouth animation in After Effects.