So you'd like to make your own South Park animation video and get millions of hits on YouTube? This tutorial will explain how to do it. It assumes that you already know how to use a computer and know the basics of how to use the required software. If you need help with the software, there are lots of tutorials online on how to use them. A quick Google search will help you out.
Before we begin, be aware that making a South Park video is a ton of work. If you want to create something really great and make people think it's from a real South Park episode, expect to spend lots and lots of time on the details.
You will need the following software:
Adobe Photoshop, GIMP (free), or other image editing software
Adobe Flash or other animation software
Audacity (free) or other sound editing software
SWF to AVI converter like AVS Video Converter (free)
Before we start with the technical aspect of creating a South Park video, you have to write a script. This is important, because it acts as your blueprint for this project. Writing a script isn't hard, but it makes you think about your entire video. Come up with the dialogue and what actions are taken on screen. It doesn't have to be written in an official script format, but it's important that you have your story written down before you start animating.
Ok, now that you have a script, we can move on to a more fun part of this project: making your characters. Go to South Park Studio. It's a website where you can create your very own South Park character in minutes. Once there, go ahead and make your character. When you're done, take a screenshot of your screen by pressing the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard in Windows or "Command" + "Shift" + "3" on a Mac. If you're on Windows, your screenshot was saved in the clipboard, ready to be pasted somewhere. On a Mac, your screenshot is saved on your desktop.
Now open Photoshop, GIMP, or your favorite image editing software and create a new page (usually by pressing CTRL+N or Command+N). Then paste your screen into the new canvas if you're on Windows, or drag your screenshot picture into it if you're on a Mac.
It's important that you now disect your newly created South Park character into lots of different layers that you want to animate later (like mouth, eyes, eyebrows, head, body). Make sure to save your file often.
When you're done creating layers, it's time to start the animation process. But before we do that, we need the audio of the characters speaking, otherwise you won't know what to animate the mouth movements to. Open Audacity or your favorite audio recording software and record what the characters will be saying by reading off your script. I recommend to make seperate recordings for each character and for each sentence. That way you have more flexibility in the animation. After you've made all of your recordings, adjust the pitch so they sound like the kids in South Park. Make sure you give your characters slightly different pitch, otherwise they'll sound the same (unless you have different people record different characters). When you're done, save the files as WAV or MP3s.
Great, now that we have all the pieces we need, we can do the animations. Open Adobe Flash or your favorite animation software and import all the layers from Photoshop and all the sound files you created. Create your animation. This is by far the most tedious and annoying part of a project like this. Animating takes a lot of work if you do it by hand like this. But when you're satisfied with it, you can export the finished file to the SWF format.
Almost done! Now we have to convert your Flash animation to an actual video file in order to be able to upload it to YouTube. For that you'll need to get an SWF to AVI converter program like AVS Video Converter. Use it to convert your SWF file to an AVI movie.
Once the conversion is complete, watch it to make sure everything looks good and the audio is synced correctly with the animation. If the audio is not in sync with the video, try different settings or a different converter. When everything is good to go, upload the file to YouTube and send the link to everyone you know on Facebook and Twitter. Also post it on Digg and Reddit. If you did a good job and your video is funny, you too will soon have millions of views on YouTube! Good luck!