an in-depth interview with the South Park creators about “That World of Warcraft Episode”

Q: How would you compare making South Park’s traditional animation with making machinima ‘animation’? Was one method easier than the other, or more interesting, or...?

JJ: Well, as Trey said when we wrapped up the last ‘shoot,’ this is definitely where animation is headed. I know that there were frustrations, but most of them were mere technical limitations that can and hopefully will be addressed in the future. Things like the ability to record an individual character’s performance, and then have that character give the exact same performance each take would have been very useful because that way the performances could be treated almost like sound channels in an audio mixing program or video clips in an editing system. The ability to have full control over every single aspect of what is being seen in frame has got to be any director's ultimate dream. Combine that with the extreme flexibility of a virtual environment, and there quite literally is no limit to what could be done...

ES: The set up for machinima animation takes a lot longer. Originally we were going to try to produce our own video game that the South Park characters play. But we usually produce South Park in a week and there’s just no time to create our own backgrounds, props and characters. We were so relieved we could use the warcraft world to tell our story.
Machinima.com: Make Love, Not Warcraft (Thanks, Weezie!)