Making Love Not Warcraft

South Park's Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny as World of Warcraft characters in the South Park episode Make Love Not Warcraft.

One of the biggest things to happen to Machinima last year was the use of it to create Make Love Not Warcraft, an episode of South Park that parodied the popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft and gamers in general. Machinima.com has an interview with South Park's Frank Agnone, J.J. Franzen, and Eric Stough explaining how Machinima was used to create in-game sequences in the episode.

One of the things that impressed me about Make Love Not Warcraft was the relatively high degree of lip sync in the Machinima sequences, which I didn't realize could be done in a game like Warcraft. Turns out that it can't; Warcraft's publisher Blizzard helped the show cheat a little bit, providing South Park's animators with Maya models of the characters to animate conventionally for close-ups. Even if it's not technically 100% "true" Machinima though, Make Love Not Warcraft is a great example of how Machinima and real-time animation can be incorporated in to a professional production pipeline.