Make Love, Not Warcraft Developer Interview
Many questions came up after the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft aired, concerning the machinima footage in the show. The show used extensive footage inside the Warcraft game engine, but the animations were really tight, so many were wondering how much input Blizzard had in the making of the episode.
The folks at Machinima.com interviewed key members of the production team for the episode, and they had some enlightening things to say about the development of the WoW episode.
In September of last year, Trey Parker held a meeting with all of the leads of South Park and mentioned that he wanted to create an episode about an MMO. Later on he decided on World of Warcraft as the perfect vehicle for the episode.
”...the idea of the “video game show” as we were calling it, resurfaced. We had a production meeting at Trey’s house on Friday, Sept. 1st, and went over all the experiments and design work we had done to date. Once again, the idea was brought up of using WoW to shoot the in-game footage, with the added possibility of re-creating the characters in Maya, the 3D animation program we use to produce the show, in order to do close ups with full lipsynch and facial expressions.”
So Parker contacted Blizzard to help out with the development, they were excited to work with South Park and provided them with character models in Maya format. They spent some time rigging all of the models for more expressive facial animations.
It was different for us to tackle the 3D animation shots versus the traditional 2D animation stuff that we do. It took three full weeks of production to produce the WOW episode and it takes us six day normally to put a South Park episode on the air. It is much easier to produce South Park style animation than the Machinima animation.
Check out the rest of this fascinating look into the development of South Park and advanced machinima techniques.
Toots
Posted to Television, Video Games on 18 November 2006
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Other stuff like this: machinima, make love not warcraft, south park
You can find other information and inside pictures taken by Tristan Pope (one of the machinima artists for in game) at http://www.craftingworlds.com :)
~poae