Paper As A Form Of Animation.

Using paper as a form of animation these days such as South Park for example is done by the animators by making new elements in Corel Draw and exporting them as Adobe Illustrator files. Adobe Photoshop is used for fonts, texture maps, and real photographs. The Photoshop and Illustrator files are then sent in to an Alias/Wavefront's Power Animator 8.5 and Composer on SGI 02 and Octane work stations, where they are used for animating the episodes. After the animation get's Trey's approval, it is sent with the audio to be edited and mixed using Avid Media Composers on Mac computers.

South Park is an American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central Television Network. Intended for mature audiences, South Park has become famous for it's crude language and dark, surreal humor. The on-going narrative revolves around four boys, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick and their bizarre adventures in and around the Colorado town.
Parker and Stone developed the show from two animated shorts they created in 1992 and 1995. The latter became one of the first internet videos and instantly became viral, which ultimately led to its production as a series. South Park debuted in August 1997 with great success consistently earning the highest rating of any basic cable programme.

The Shows style of animation was inspired by the paper cut out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which Parker and Stone have been life long fans. Construction paper and traditional stop motion cutout animation techniques were used in the original animated shorts and in the pilot episode. Subsequent episodes have been produced by computer animation, providing a similar look to the originals while requiring a fraction of the time to produce.

The characters and objects are composed of simple geometrical shapes and primary colors. Their movements are animated in an intentionally jerky fasion, as they are purposely not offered the same free range of motion associated with hand drawn characters. When the show began using computers, the cardboard cut outs were scanned and re drawn with CorelDRAW, then imported into Power Animator, which was used with SGI workstations to animate the characters. The workstations were linked to a 54-processor render farm that could render 10 to 15 shots an hour. The studio now runs a 120-processor render farm that can produce 30 or more shots an hour.
Power Animator and Maya are high end programmes mainly used for 3D computer graphics, while co producer and former animation director, Eric Stough, notes that Power Animator was initially chosen because its features helped animators retain the show's 'homemade' look. Power Animator was also used for making some of the shows special effects, which are now created using Motion, a newer graphics programme created by Apple, Inc.