And so it begins...

No really...

Published on April 7, 2005 By jfranzen In Welcome

So, I'm finally giving the blog thing a shot. Figured it might help me keep things straight in my head as well as be interesting to some of the people in my industry. First things first. Introductions. My name is J. J. Franzen, and I am the Technology Supervisor for Comedy Central's South Park. As many know, while South Park is a rather simple-looking show, in reality it is one of the most demanding animated productions, in both terms of technology and personal effort, on the air today. The primary reason behind this is also one of the things that keeps the show so popular, our ability to keep things topical.

If something big happens on a Tuesday while we are in production, odds are a mention of it can be included in the next day's episode, mainly because we haven't finished making the episode yet. We get as close to live as any animated show can get. We get Video Lock, which means all animation is approved, sometime early Weds. morning on the day the episode airs. This means that the brand new episode you are watching Wednesday night was finished about 12 hours earlier. The people who work in animation who are reading this are swearing in disbelief right now. But it is true. And quite demanding.

As the Tech. Sup., it's my job to make sure everything stays up and running throughout a produciton run, as well as specifiy and implement pipeline improvements to be done during our down times. That breaks down to me coming in at 9am and going home when the last artist does, which is anywhere from 8pm to 3am. This is over the entire production run, which usually lasts 7-8 weeks, what we call "Crunch Time". I usually average about 100 hours a week during Crunch. This latest run has been particularly brutal for us though. My average has been 115 hours a week. And we still have two episodes to go.

Part of what has made this run difficult is the fact we have switched workstations from Windows-based systems to Mac OSX G5s. The switch has gone fairly smoothly, aside from some problems with our primary program, Alias' Maya, but any major change in an artist's workflow is going to slow them down until they have adjusted. The other thing that has made this run so difficult is the fact that the creators are pushing themselves, and hence us, to break new ground with the show, both with content and with our visual style. So there are more crowd shots per show (something you don't really see much of in animation), as well as more intricately detailed characters.

All of this has the end effect of making the job of keeping things running smoothly a very life-consuming thing. After last weeks episode (Best Friends Forever, where the Legions of Hell storm Heaven's gates) had us wrapping out at 10am Weds. morning after starting the day at 9am Tues, it was decided we need more render power. We currently have a 60 processor render farm, which is respectable for a small animation house like us, but we are now doubling that number. This creates the domino effect of having to increase the air conditioning in our machine room, as well as having to wire more power into the room, and replacing our current UPS (Un-interruptable Power Supply, basically a giant battery to keep the machines running if we lose power) to something much larger. Hopefully it also means we might get to go home a little earlier on Weds. mornings.

I guess that's part of the reason for starting this blog. Just to chronicle this and other changes to the SP production that will be happening over the next few months to see what kind of effect it has. Hopefully this log will become a useful resource for other small animation houses out there in what does and does not work in producing an CG animated TV show.

Well, the writers have set down in the conference room here to start working on ideas for next week's show, E_906. Here's hoping it's a nice easy one. Shyeah. As if...

J^2

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