Karma Catches Up to South Park

It's no secret that the men behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, work a tight production schedule. The Emmy-nominated 2011 documentary, 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, gives an inside look at how crazy their schedule really is. Like the documentary title suggests, South Park writes, records, animates, and edits each episode in six days. If you know anything about the production process, you'll realize how ridiculous this system is. Most animated shows have the episode written months before the air date. But South Park is unlike any other show out there. This risky set-up allows them to produce topical content, always making a satirical comment on current events. It is what makes South Park such a great show. For instance, the day after President Obama beat McCain in the 2008 Presidential Election, South Park came out with the episode "About Last Night..." Not only do they include the election results, the episode even has excerpts from the candidates speeches that took place the night before the episode aired.

The team has been able to meet each deadline as a result of an absolutely chaotic schedule. On Wednesday, an episode airs. Thursday morning, they enter the studio and brainstorm ideas. By the end of the day, they've thrown together a script. As soon as they arrive on Friday, they begin recording and animating. In the documentary, Parker and Stone admit that Tuesday is usually a 24-hour day. They get to the studio at 9 am and work until they finish, which is often 9 am on Wednesday. Then they send the episode to Comedy Central and it airs that night. Honestly, it's a miracle they went this long without missing a deadline.

After 17 seasons of this absurd production schedule, karma finally caught up with the team. This past Tuesday, October 15th, South Park Studios lost all electrical power for hours. This prevented them from further animating, rendering, and editing in their primitive crunch time. The unfortunately outcome was South Park's first missed deadline, on the show's 241st episode. It seems the creators were destined to miss a deadline eventually with such a down-to-the-wire production method. They have been tempting the production gods for far too long by delivering episode after episode last minute. Still, you have to give it to the team for never before failing to create a new episode from scratch in six days. To make up for not having a new episode, Parker and Stone live tweeted the re-run of classic episode, "Scott Tenorman Must Die."

Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the studio during the blackout, realizing they won't be able to make their deadline.

Missing this deadline does not damaged South Park's reputation in any way. At the end of the day, they're still the only show that brings us offensive, yet intellectual satirical comments on current events in our society. Though Comedy Central may be upset by the missed deadline, this is my opinion on the whole situation. If missing one deadline every 241 episodes is the price they must pay for maintaining the topical content, they must be doing something right. No other crew would be able to pull off such a chaotic schedule, especially in this industry.

South Park - 6 Days To Air

Last week I watched a documentary about Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the hit animated comedy series, South Park. The documentary was titled, "6 Days To Air" and It followed the South Park creators over the six days that it took them to create the season 15 premier episode for the show. The documentary took the viewer through the entire pre-production, production and post production process and explained just how an episode of South Park is created. I think the most interesting thing about the documentary was that Parker and Stone created an entire episode of South Park in just 6 Days! It usually takes similar shows, like Family Guy and The Simpsons, approximately 9 months to create a whole episode and they are doing it in less than a week.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone had just finished making their new Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon. I saw the musical over the summer by winning lottery tickets to the show. I won 475 dollar tickets for only 30 bucks, it was sweet! The Book of Mormon was without a doubt the funniest show that I have ever seen, better than any TV show or movie. The songs were incredible and the acting was great. It was hilarious and I highly recommend it to everyone. I also recommend trying to win the tickets through the lottery because they are very expensive.

After completing The Book of Mormon, Parker and Stone had to get back to focusing on South Park. The documentary took you into the writers room and showed the viewer how they came up with the ideas for the episode. The documentary also took the viewer through the storyboarding process, voice recording process, the animating process and the distribution process. I thought that it was incredibly how these guys could create an entire episode in under week. They worked day and night for that week but were able to pull it off.

The episode was called, "Humancentipad" and it made fun of Steve Jobs and Apple. I thought that it was one of the best South Park episodes of all time. This documentary was very interesting and I really liked how it took the viewer through the whole process of creating an episode of South Park.

Making South Park

6 Days to Air documents the making of a South Park episode from start to finish. This hour long documentary produced by Comedy Central on the animated cartoon introduces us to creators (and voice talent) Trey Parker and Matt Stone as well, detailing their creative habits.

First animated with cardboard cutouts in stop frame, South Park took sometimes weeks to produce in its early days. Shows like The Simpsons and American Dad take months in production. South Park now takes as little as 6 days to produce, now using the power of computers to speed up the animation. It's how South Park remains the most relevant and topical animated show on air.

Even though it's done in a 2D style, it looks like they are using AutoDesk Maya to accelerate the production process.

The documentary takes us through the writers' meeting. SNL's Bill Hader, a couple of other writers help out Parker and Stone develop ideas and a story. Trey Parker is then responsible for the bulk of the script. Co-Executive Producer Anne Garefino also sits in during the writers' meeting to help communicate ideas to animators and to serve as a gauge of ridiculousness/offensiveness.

It's really very interesting watching such a stressful weekly production schedule produce such quality shows. It's the industry we are going into and it's nice to see actual production, instead of just the glossy end-product.