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South Park fastracks Obama

Just 24 hours after he was declared winner, Barack Obama was parodied in South Park -with lines taken direct from his speech.

On Wednesday night in the US, South Park featured an episode entirely about Barack Obama and John McCain.

What was most impressive was it included scenes of Obama’s Grant Park acceptance speech (complete with those unsettling bulletproof walls) plus John McCain’s concession speech.

While some of the scenes could have been prepared earlier, it’s still an impressive turnaround.

“We’ve only ever worked on an Obama version,” said Parker and Stone, when asked if they prepared two versions in case McCain won. “We followed Vegas odds. If McCain would have won we would have been screwed.”

But did they have weepin’ Oprah?

Source: Hollywood Reporter

11 Responses

  1. Thanks for that! I’m amazed that with today’s technology, a program (animated none the less) is getting done faster than Network Ten in Australia can change it’s schedule after another flop…

    If only now SBS could truly fasttrack South Park…

  2. From what I have read, 1 south park episode, it take 3 days to animate it all. Apparently they have a new computer program that practically does it all for them

  3. South Park is done in the USA. They have a facility where almost all the show is done. Basically everything, except if music and voices need to be done by people interstate. The animation is obviously much cruder than the Simpson, but it means it can be done really quickly. Most episodes are made in the week before they air. That’s writing the script, animating, voices, music ect. Start work on thursday, deliver on the wednesday it airs in the USA. Just hours before it goes to air in many cases.

    As they write an episode they start designing and animating in conjunction with the writing process so they can get pretty immediate looks at how things are turning out, and they do this, and fine tune, see what’s working and what isn’t working. It’s a non linear production, with lots of back and forth and changing if need be. Sometime’s episodes just aren’t working. Apparently the Awesome-O episode was a last minute job started the day before it aired when the episode they were working on just wasn’t coming out well. They animate using Maya which is a really power 3d graphics suite, but they don’t need any of that power, it’s just easy to animate their objects and style and give them flexibility. They have a huge library of locations and objects so it’s really easy to construct scenes. Hence how it’s so fast to produce animating.

    They often regularly pull all nighter on Tuesdays to finish episode, this was no exception.

  4. As they said, most of the episode was done before the result was known, but it was quite impressive the way they included the Obama’s victory speech and McCain’s concession speech. The idea of the episode was funny, but it did look like a bit of a hack job and wasn’t well executed. I loved the idea of Palin putting on a dumb act to appeal to the masses.

  5. They typically take only a few days to animate an entire episode, and it’s written only a week before it airs, so that kind of turnaround is not surprising.

    It is impressive they can do that, though. Only “Live” shows can be faster.

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