South Park and the 1-week turnaround -- OUAN405

South Park, created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, is well known for being crude, offensive and puerile in its storytelling, but among the deliberately obnoxious plots (they don't hold back from racist, sexist, or homophobic jokes) can be found heaps of often subtle political satire. The trick to South Park's success is a team of dedicated writers and animators, based at the headquarters in California, who are able to turn out an episode in one week. In contrast to other animated sitcoms like the Simpsons, which take around eight months to complete an episode, South Park's quick turnaround allows them to include up to date political issues. The animators use Maya to replicate the look of the original short, the Spirit of Christmas, which Stone and Parker made with traditional cutout techniques, and it allows them to work to tight deadlines in a way that hand-drawn animations can't keep up with. We can also assume that having animators, writers, storyboarders and voice actors all within the same building during production encourages the speed and efficiency with which the episodes are completed, as any last minute changes to scripts, characters or set designs can be put into effect straight away. Possibly the best example of South Park reacting to current events might be the episode About  Last Night, which focused on the result of the 2008 presidential election. The episode was written before the results came in, with two alternate scripts prepared for use in either outcome. As much as possible was animated beforehand, and then when news of Obama's victory came through the voice actors and animators set to work completing the rest of the episode. The turnaround on the episode was so quick they were even able to include voice recording from Obama's acceptance speech, given only 24 hours before the episode aired. More recently South Park has parodied the rise in popularity of Donald Trump - within a week of his suggestion that a wall should be built to stop South American immigrants, an episode aired including a xenophobic Canadian president strongly resembling Trump who had erected a wall around Canada.