South Park animation staff talks about "Make Love Not Warcraft"
by Elizabeth Harper 
Nov 16th 2006 at 12:45PM
Did you know the episode was actually shot on the Burning Crusade alpha server? (Blizzard simply made it so that anyone who got in the way of filming mysteriously vanished...) Or that filming didn't stop until 3AM on the day the show was to air? These, and many other interesting tidbits about the making of South Park's very own World of Warcraft machinima can be found in Machinima.com's interview with Frank Agnone (Producer), J. J. Franzen (Technology Supervisor), and Eric Stough (Director of Animation). So if you're a big fan of South Park and wanting a look behind the making of the show or a machinima maker curious as to how television got involved in the art it's worth a read!
[Thanks, Barb!]
Filed under: Machinima
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Swiftlydead Nov 16th 2006 1:43PM
Best Ep ever, IMO. I'm glad they kept it all nerdy by only showing alliance characters. It would have been harder to pull off the whole uber-nerdy deal with Horde characters since they're actually interesting...
freehugz Nov 16th 2006 5:07PM
... such a typical horde thing to say.
ikono Nov 21st 2006 1:24AM
I like how some of those answers were contradictory...
Q: Who determined how the characters would look in the game? For example, who decided Cartman would be the dwarf and Kenny the S&M-looking dude? Or should I say, why did the kids choose those particular avatars for themselves?
JJ: That was all Trey. He sat down with Tristan and the WoW Model Viewer and they just hammered it out. Trey would have a specific look he wanted, like Stan being a knight, and then they would just browse through the models and find something that Trey liked. All the "main" characters were specified by Trey. The rest of the background characters I made by just hitting randomize until I saw something I liked.
ES: Trey sat with the Blizzard team for about an hour and had free reign with the characters. We tried best to pick out close colors and match funny personas between our characters and the Warcraft characters. Kenny was the hardest. We wanted to find a character that had something that muffled his voice. Every character reminded us too much of the character we used in our anime show so we decided to go with something different. We made him the Hunter whose mouth was visible but we thought it was funny that his voice would still be muffled through his computer's microphone.
Q: Why would the kids choose to be Alliance rather than Horde?
JJ: Well, one thing that Trey had always been definite about was to have Cartman be a dwarf. It just fit too well to not have it. So, that automatically made everyone Alliance so they could be all playing together...
ES: We figured it was easier for our audience to relate to the alliance characters. Especially the fans who don't know what World of Warcraft is.
Wartoad Nov 17th 2006 11:51AM
"Sweet."