P2. Animation Comparison

Peppa Pig
'CelAction' was the name of the software used to animate Peppa Pig, as well as 'Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom' and 'The Big Knights'. It is a 2D animation software that's intended for films, television series and commercials. It uses vectors and/or bitmaps, character models can be rigged into a skeleton so that animation can be changed and reused easily. Effects are built into the scene so they can be created, animated and edited quickly by the editors themselves. There are over 60 effects available, scenes can be made visually richer and more dynamic with very little effort.

Dot
Dot was created with a Nokia N8 mobile phone that had been attached to a microscope. They had to have 50 different replacements of Dot to create the 2 minute short film, and there were three copies for each pose. They used stop-motion to create the short: positioning the character and taking a picture before moving Dot slightly and taking the next picture. Dot was made by an animator who created 2D designs and gave them to a 3D modeller who used a 3D printer to make the character. Dot was placed on wire and the editor hid it by using a back plate.

South Park
The shows style of animation is inspired by the paper cut-out cartoons made by Terry Gilliam for Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which Parker and Stone have been fans. Construction paper and traditional stop motion cutout animation techniques were used in the original animated shorts and in the pilot episode. Later episodes have been produced by computer animation, providing a similar look to the originals but take a fraction of the time to create. Before the computer artists began animating an episode, a series of animatics drawn with Adobe Photoshop are provided by the show's storyboard artists.