How To Make Paper Cut Out Animation Like South Park

Dig This! Using computers to simulate cutting-out blitheness techniques on South Park and Blue's Clues.

Animation World Mag takes a jaunt into the innovative and remarkable: this month we expect at two productions that are using computers to simulate cut-out blitheness techniques: South Park and Blue'due south Clues

In this historic period of technology, many "old-fashioned" animation techniques take been abased for computer-generated imagery. However, a new trend is emerging, 1 which uses the computer as a tool to accomplish the wait of onetime-fashioned techniques while taking reward of the ease of production that technology offers.

Example in betoken: South Park and Blue's Clues. "What could these two radically dissimilar shows--i for adults and one for pre-schoolers--take in common?," you may inquire. The answer is that they both use computer blitheness software to create a expect that many uninformed viewers presume is the product of painstaking cut-out blitheness. What most people don't know is that quite a flake of technology is at work to achieve that "home-grown" wait, shadows, textures and all.

South Park

At a production studio hidden away in Marina Del Rey, California, animators and technical directors on the Due south Park TV show and feature film use high-cease equipment: Silicon Graphics workstations running Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator software to create a virtual plane--in 3D infinite--on which "apartment" figurer-generated characters are animated. Fifty-fifty the texture of construction paper is applied in the computer, and that "no-platen" shadow look is achieved past separating the character'due south parts with a small layer of infinite as would occur in real cut-out animation, which is, in example you were wondering, the technique Trey Parker and Matt Stone used to create The Spirit of Christmas, the animated short that spawned the One-act Central series. Monica Mitchell, a production manager on Due south Park, pointed out that it would take been nearly impossible to produce the testify with construction newspaper. "Time and flexibility are the bottom line," she said, noting that changes to the show are often made the day before broadcast.

Blue's Clues

At Nickelodeon'southward digital studio in New York, animators on Blueish's Clues are using Macintosh computers running Photoshop and Adobe After Furnishings software to combine animated sets and characters with a alive-activeness host. Fifty-fifty storyboards are created in Quark, so that they tin can exist revised after various stages of the bear witness's extensive child-testing process. While alive-action is being shot on video (confronting a green-screen, color-key background), artists create props and characters out of clay and simple materials, then photograph them with a digital camera. The images are then cleaned-up and dressed-up, a process series co-creator and designer Traci Paige-Johnson calls making the images "yummy," then imported to After Effects where they are blithe and composited with the live-action footage. Serial co-creator and executive producer Todd Kessler said that when the show was being developed, the applied science decisions came out of the needs of the content. "The whole idea behind going 'depression-tech' and animating on desktop computers was to spend as petty equally possible on equipment, so that we could spend the largest portion of our budget on artistic talent." Nickelodeon recently started product on a new serial called Little Bill which will utilise the Blue's Clues procedure.

Both Blue's Clues and South Park creators apply the computer equally a very sophisticated photographic camera which enables the production process to exist broken down into stages that can exist handled by different teams of people: storyboards, design and layout, lip-sync, and animation. Both shows utilise relatively small production teams--ranging from 15 to 30 people per episode, compared to the huge staffs, both in-house and overseas, needed to produce a typical 2nd or cel-animated series. We can expect to see more than of this kind of calculator use in animation, blurring the line between CGI and traditional blitheness, and breaking through once-prohibitive cost and time barriers.

Wendy Jackson is associate editor of Animation Earth Mag.

What else should nosotros dig? Every month, Animation World Magazine will highlight the virtually interesting, heady happenings in animation, in "Dig This!" Send usa your ideas, suggestions, videos, products or works-in-progress today. You dig? E-mail: editor@awn.com.

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Source: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/dig-using-computers-simulate-cut-out-animation-techniques-south-park-and-blues-clues

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