Snapz Pro X Used to Create South Park Episode!

Posted Dec 14 2006, 12:00 AM

For those that are fans of Comedy Central's smash hit South Park, you are going to be excited to learn that Ambrosia's own Snapz Pro X 2 was recently used to bring one of it's funniest episodes to light.
 
In the episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" the creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, had their characters discover the addiction that many of us already have. This addiction of course is WoW... The World of Warcraft. For any readers that have recently been released from a holding cell deep underneath the sheets of Antarctica and somehow don't know what this is allow me to share it with you. First I want to state this: I take no responsibility if upon learning about this game and trying it for yours, you suddenly loose all control of your life and find yourself living in front of your computer, with your only means of communication is with your Horde brethren. World of Warcraft (commonly abbreviated as WoW) is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Players subscribe to play this real-time strategy game, controlling characters they design in a enormous persistent game-world. It is the world's leading subscription-based MMORPG with over 7.5 million players worldwide! 

But back to the topic at hand... the addiction has now spread to the cartoon world, as the boys of South Park have taken up the game. The creators of South Park decided to have an episode in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage of the Game itself. After Trey Parker had decided to have a full 3D Episode with in-game footage, the crew had to devise a way to do it and do it well. The challenge for the show was to get the great footage and action they acted out from the WoW world to the real world. That is when they turned to the Mac and Ambrosia's own Snapz Pro X 2. Members of Machinima.com were recently interviewed to ask them how they managed to create this extremely entertaining episode. 
 
J.J. Franzen, Technology Supervisor, was quoted as saying:
One of the neat things about the process was since we were capturing on a Mac with SnapzPro, we were able to output a quicktime file that then could immediately be imported into our AVIDs for editing. So, Trey would shoot for an hour or so, and then cut what he just shot right into the show to see how it was working. If he liked it, we moved on, if he didn't we re-shot. It was all very dynamic and fast paced...
 
I think this is a nice little feather in the cap for Snapz Pro X 2. This is a show that has made me laugh all the way back to my first year of College when it came on the air. It makes me a bit proud to know that one of Ambrosia's own products helped bring one of the more memorable episodes to life.
 

Read the Full Interview which includes clips from the episode.