Absurdly Short Production Time

Movies, TV shows and video games all take at least a year or two to create... right?

Well, not always.

Sometimes, a movie or TV show takes a short amount of time to make and release, usually a few days or a couple weeks. This is especially common for small and/or independent productions, as they have smaller budgets than bigger movies, and therefore have less to work with to make the final product.

However, this can also be a case of making an Ashcan Copy; the short production time merely being the result of the company losing their rights to a franchise that they own, and they either want to retain it, or make as much money from the IP before they lose it, depending on the original contract signed.

This trope generally does not relate to total time between concept and final product, but specifically about the practical time to create the physical material, and as such, this trope applies to media outside of movies, TV shows and video games as well.

Contrast with the inverse, Extremely Lengthy Creation, where a work takes a long time to produce, and Development Hell, where a work's production gets delayed for different reasons. Compare Christmas Rushed.

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Typical production times by medium:

• Anime & Manga:
  • An episode of an anime takes about six weeks to create. Some take even longer for particularly detailed scenes, such as big-scale Shōnen fights.
  • Manga chapters usually take the span of time between each one's publication to make. Thus, a weekly manga would take one week to make a new chapter, a monthly manga one month per chapter, etc.
• Comic Books:
  • Comic books usually take about two months to go from a script to the final product for a ~24-page issue.
  • The pencil drawings for comics are generally done at a rate of one to two pages a day.
• Films:
  • Most major movies take about three months for filming while independent films typically take about six weeks, depending on the schedule a movie can be made in about 9 months.
  • A large scale movie with heavy post-production usually takes 4-6 months of filming but with a complete turnaround of about 2 years.
  • Animated films can take anywhere from 4-7 years to complete a 90-minute movie, even with a small army of animators.
• Literature: Most fictional books take between one to two years to write, especially from more established writers.
• Live-Action TV:
  • An episode of a half-hour comedy series usually shoots in 3-4 days.
  • An episode of an hour-long drama series usually takes 8-10 days to film.
• Music:
  • A typical major label studio album will take about six months to a year to write and record, and six months to handle logistics, pressing, sample clearances, publication and promotion.
  • A normal album cycle for a major label artist is about two years - one album drop, one year touring.
• Video Games:
  • An original video game usually takes 3-6 years to develop. A sequel using the existing Game Engine and assets can take as little as two years, but various factors (number of release platforms, the genre, scale of the game, etc.) can greatly extend this as well.
  • Mobile games take a shorter time to make, usually one to two years.
• Western Animation: An average episode of a Western animated series takes about nine months to create, though some shows may require at least one year per episode.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball: While the manga ran continuously for over a decade, each chapter only took a day and a half to make. Akira Toriyama attributed this to his poor work ethic, spending most of his time goofing off before rushing out each week's chapter just before it was due. Other mangaka, meanwhile, have repeatedly expressed amazement at Toriyama's ability to do this for so long, noting the immense skill needed to write and draw a week's worth of material that quickly.
• The English dub of Speed Racer was afforded two days per episode for production: One for writing and one for recording.

Films — Animation

• It's traditional for an animated mockbuster to be rushed into production the moment the film it's ripping off has its first trailer released.
• The Transformers: The Movie was produced in just two years, less than half the time it takes to make most animated films.
• As illustrated in the example with South Park in the Western Animation folder, its feature film Bigger, Longer, and Uncut took only a year and a half to make.
• Although announced in March 2000 and production not starting until 2003, the Wallace & Gromit feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit spent two years in production, a rarity for a stop-motion animated film.

Films — Live-Action

• The controversial Filipino director Carlo J. Caparas gained notoriety for churning out exploitation films made in just seven days, aptly called "pito-pito" (lit. "seven-seven"). This and a myriad of other anomalies in his inclusion as a National Artist in 2009 led to the Supreme Court of the Philippines stripping him of the honour in 2013.
• There exists in the indie filmmaking community challenges to make feature films within a short timeframe - usually 72 hours. The scripts are allowed to be written in advance for obvious reasons. Short film challenges with the same turnaround also exist, but are considerably more feasible.
• Tyler Perry tends to make his films quicker than the average Hollywood production. Nobody's Fool took ten days to film, Acrimony took eight days, A Madea Family Funeral took less than a week, and Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace took five days. Part of this has to do with the ways his production studio is specifically designed. The other major contributing factor is that his company specifically does not hire union labor, meaning they have legal wiggle room in how long their staff work at a time.
• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) reportedly took anywhere from two months to just 23 days to make, owed to a prolonged and meticulous rehearsal period built around its continuous-take cinematography.
• The Blair Witch Project was shot over just eight days, owing to its unconventional Mockumentary filming method where the actors went on scavenger hunts to find supplies and script directions, while filming using basic consumer camcorders.
• Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo managed to get itself out just seven months after the first film, both being released in 1984.
• Cyborg (1989) was rushed into production to use some sets and costumes made for two aborted projects, with director Albert Pyun writing a script in a weekend and then filming everything in 23 days.
• James Bond: The reason why the film series was able to have a pace of one film per year in the early 1960s.
  • The first film, Dr. No, was filmed in two months under a paltry $1 million budget, coming out seven months later.
  • The next one, From Russia with Love, doubled both the budget and how long the principal photography lasted - but in the latter's case, four months when the movie would come out in six meant a much hectic Troubled Production.
  • Thunderball also had a pretty brisk production time, despite the heavy logistics involved.
• Ed Wood has shot movies like Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space in three days.
• Halloween (1978) was shot in only twenty days. This tight schedule contributed to much of the film's direction. Most famously, John Carpenter had Michael Myers' costume rushed out as quickly as possible by telling his staff to grab the cheapest getup they could find - they came back with a $2 Captain Kirk mask, which was then hastily spray-painted white.
• Host was written in two weeks, shot in two weeks, and edited in eight weeks. The team was dead set on getting it out as soon as possible, given that it takes place during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Jaws: The Revenge took ten months to produce, from the day it was greenlit to its release date. It didn't even have a script written when pre-production started.
• Leprechaun 2 had a rushed production and was released to theaters nine months after production began.
• The Little Shop of Horrors was famously shot in just two days to get more use of sets built for A Bucket of Blood before they were demolished.
• Locke took eight nights.
• Mandalay was filmed in ten days.
• Margin Call: On top of being a movie with a low budget despite its All-Star Cast, the film was shot in 17 days, with most scenes shot inside the single floor of a building.
• Memento took 25 days to complete, with Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano only doing a day of work with Guy Pearce.
• Moonlight (2016): The movie took 25 days to complete, with Mahershala Ali coming in consecutive weekends to film due to his busy schedule and Naomie Harris completing filming in three days.
• Phone Booth took 10 days to film, with two additional days for pickups and establishing shots.
• The very first fiction film to be made about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the now-lost Saved from the Titanic, was released to theatres just 31 days after the disaster.
• This is a staple of the Saw series. While post-production time varies greatly, most of the films are filmed in less than three months.
  • Saw was filmed in 18 days.
  • Saw II was filmed in 25 days.
  • Saw III was filmed in 27 days.
  • Saw IV took the shortest time to film by a narrow margin to Saw, at 17 days.
  • Saw V was filmed in 42 days.
  • Saw VI was filmed in 44 days.
  • Saw 3D was filmed in 63 days.
  • Jigsaw didn't have exact dates of its filming published, but it's stated to have taken place between November 2016 and January 2017 (about two months).
  • Spiral was filmed in 51 days.
  • Saw X is the first exception, taking about four months to film between October 2022 and February 2023, making it the installment with the longest filming time (and surpassing Saw 3D in that regard).
• Whiplash was filmed in 19 days, getting in takes over 14-hour days.
• While pre-production of White Dog dragged on for six years thanks to original director Roman Polański being charged with raping a minor, once filming commenced, it was completed in just 45 days to avoid potential strikes by writers and directors across Hollywood.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story was only budgeted for 18 days of filming.
• Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey only took 10 days for filming.

Literature

• NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge where one has to write 50,000 words throughout the month of November. Bestsellers such as Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, were written from this challenge (though they were likely edited prior to acquisition and publication).
• Isaac Asimov wrote "Insert Knob A in Hole B" while in a TV show, although he later admitted he anticipated a request to do so, and so considered ideas in advance.
• Judy Blume wrote Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. in only six weeks.
• Ray Bradbury wrote his short story The Fireman at a pay typewriter in just nine days. When his publisher urged him to expand the story into a novel, Bradbury returned to that same typing room and wrote Fahrenheit 451 (which, at 50,000 words, was twice as long as The Fireman) in another nine days.
• Anthony Burgess claimed to have written A Clockwork Orange in just three weeks.
• Charles Dickens churned out and sold A Christmas Carol in only six weeks to finish in time for Christmas and to pay the medical bills after the birth of his fifth child.
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle was written in only three weeks.
• Two of Harlan Ellison's most well-regarded stories, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream were each written the night before their respective deadlines.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered one of the best novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston completed the novel in seven weeks.
• Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas in just seven days to cover the costs of his mother's funeral.
• Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in under three days. After substantial criticism from his wife, Stevenson burned that draft and rewrote the story in under six days.
• Mickey Spillane wrote the first Mike Hammer book, I, the Jury, in just nineteen days.

Live-Action TV

• The first season of Charmed (1998) saw a rush to shoot each episode in less than seven days, which soon became a nightmare when one takes into account all the stunts, special effects and additional wardrobe changes required. Filming days usually lasted eighteen hours, and extreme lighting around the eyes was required to hide how tired all the actors looked, and eventually the network granted them an extra filming day.
• Saturday Night Live is infamous for its short and hectic production schedule. It typically starts on Monday morning with a pitch meeting with the week's host and continues with the cast, writers, and crew working almost all hours the rest of the week to write, prepare, and rehearse the sketches for Saturday night from scratch. And there's a dress rehearsal on Saturday night a few hours before air time, and there are typically lots of changes made between it and airtime.
• Punky Brewster: The episode "Accidents Happen", a very special episode made in response to the Challenger disaster, was first broadcast on March 9, 1986 – almost a month and a half after the tragedy occurred on January 28th.
• Made-for-TV Movie productions for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel generally have production schedules of around 10 days or so.
• A typical 22 minute episode of Meet the Browns is usually filmed in as little as 3 days. Tyler Perry's production studio is specifically constructed to facilitate this.
• Werewolf by Night (2022): Unlike most MCU entries which takes months to film and years to develop, the Special was shot in just 12 Days. And from start to finish, the Special was made over the span of just 15 months.

Music

• The Beatles: Please Please Me was famously finished in just a single day, with the band barreling through ten songs during a single 12-hour and 45-minute marathon session (the other four songs had been previously recorded and released as the A and B-sides of their first two singles).
• Bernard-M recorded and released his first album during the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Black Sabbath: The band's self-titled debut took just two days to make, one for recording, and another for mixing. According to Tony Iommi, all the songs were recorded in one take because of this.
• Brian Zaharias can often release entire 13-18 song albums within weeks or months of each other. He released 14 ^note15 if you include Built On Rock and Built On The Rock as separate albums studio albums in 2022 alone, as well as three EPs.
• Charli XCX's 2020 album how i'm feeling now was created in the span of six weeks from lockdown following the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic. For personal reference, her previous album, Charli, had only been released eight months prior, and her previous album from that came out five years prior.
• Although Daft Punk's first two studio albums were created in typical timeframes for electronic dance albums of the time (five months and two years, respectively), Human After All was written, mixed and produced in the span of six weeks—only two of which were spent on pure songwriting. This is the likely cause of the album's rough, repetitive sound.
• After abandoning his ten-year Development Hell album Detox, Dr. Dre made Compton in a few weeks.
• Many of Bob Dylan's early albums were done this way. His debut album was recorded in two sessions over three days. Another Side of Bob Dylan was done in a single marathon session. Bringing It All Back Home was recorded over a three-day period, with the second and third days' takes being the ones used on the album. John Wesley Harding was done in three one-day sessions spread out over six weeks.
• Eminem's verse on the Compton track "Medicine Man" was recorded in only a few minutes, as homage to Eminem's rushed and spontaneous recording sessions with Dre after first getting signed. The verse was recorded in one take, which Eminem points out during the verse.
• Dave Grohl recorded Foo Fighters across a week, all by himself aside from a guest guitar from Greg Dulli as he passed by the studio. Once the Foo Fighters were a band, their fourth album One by One had a Troubled Production until he decided to redo it from scratch aside from one song in two weeks - the liner notes highlight "recorded May 6-18 (that only seems quick, mind you)".
• Jaga Jazzist wrote and recorded their 2020 album Pyramid in just two weeks, by bunkering in a secluded woodland studio and working 12-hour days. In contrast, their previous album (2015's Starfire) took over two years.
• Israel Kamakawiwo'ole famously covered "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World" as a ukulele mashup. What's less known are the circumstances of its creation: Kamakawiwo'ole called a recording studio at 3:00 AM and said he had an idea for a song that he wanted to play for them right away, and the producers were so touched by his polite demeanor that they agreed to see him immediately. Kamakawiwo'ole came in and sat down while the technicians prepared the equipment, then performed the song in a single take and left. The entire process took less than an hour, and the cover (which has appeared in countless movies, TV shows, and commercials) has since been placed in the Library of Congress's National Recording Register.
• The Killers managed to create and release Pressure Machine less than a year after Imploding the Mirage, which surprised many fans given that the band have otherwise allowed for relatively lengthy gaps between albums.
• Led Zeppelin's debut album was recorded and mixed in just 36 hours over the course of a few weeks, since Jimmy Page had to pay for the studio costs himself.
• Logic's 2022 album Vinyl Days (consisting of thirty tracks and just over an hour of content) was created in just twelve days, with much of the "production" period being dedicated to getting clearance for all the samples it used. The album was made to fulfill his contract with Def Jam Recordings, and Logic admitted he did rush it out so he could become independent as soon as possible, though he did so with enough care and intent to end the partnership on a high note.
• R.E.M.: Reckoning was touted by everyone involved as having been made in a much shorter amount of time than most other records, thanks to producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon opting for a live-oriented sound compared to the effects-heavy Murmur. Peter Buck claimed that the album took just 11 days to record, Easter disputed this, stating that "it was 20 days, which was still short, but it's not 11". Reportedly, the rapid production was also influenced by a desire to avoid Executive Meddling; they wanted to have the album recorded and mastered before I.R.S. Records came to visit. Once the company did, the band just presented them the completed album, and according to Peter Buck, the company "really didn't have anything to say about it".
• Slint: Spiderland was recorded in just four days, the maximum amount of studio time the band were given. To accomplish this, the band members pulled all-nighters, subsiding entirely on energy drinks and producer Brian Paulson's strict regimen. The stress of doing so much intense work in such a short amount of time led to vocalist Brian McMahan being institutionalized for a few weeks, leading to rumors that the album was cursed.
• The Smashing Pumpkins: "1979" was written in just four hours from an instrumental snippet that Billy Corgan put together near the end of the recording sessions for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Corgan rushed out the song specifically in response to said snippet's tepid reception from Flood, the album's producer. When Flood heard the finished track, he liked it so much that he immediately stuck it on the album.
• The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat was recorded in only three days.
• Almost always the case for a Supergroup Charity Motivation Song.
  • The Ur-Example "Do They Know It's Christmas" (Band Aid) was prompted by a news report about the famine in Ethiopia that Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof saw in late October of 1984. Wanting to get the song out for the holidays, Geldof and Midge Ure hurriedly wrote the song, then Ure spent a few days putting together a backing track at his home studio. The vocals were recorded in a single 24-hour marathon session, and it was released eight days later.
  • Inspired by Band Aid, "We Are the World" (USA for Africa) was also quickly pieced together as a song by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. The original demo recording, the backing track, and the final vocal track were all recorded in single-day sessions over the course of a couple of weeks in January of 1985.
• Up until The '70s, when the rise of multitrack recording changed the approach musicians took for albums, most Jazz studio albums were generally recorded in single-day sessions, which, since the genre is built around spontaneity and improvisation, worked out well. In fact, Jazz historians and DJs often will use the word "date" to refer to a recording session, and it's meant in a quite literal sense.
• Grimes recorded Visions in just nine days while isolated in her Montreal apartment, blacking out all of the windows and limiting human contact to emulate Hildegaard von Bingen. For comparison, her followup album Art Angels took over two years to complete.

Video Games

• 2048 was developed over a weekend.
• Not only was the original NES version of Action 52 reportedly took four months to be completed, Active Enterprises also had the rather brilliant idea of hiring inexperienced programmers to rush through development, leaving little to no room for playtesting and debugging.
• The much-maligned 3DO Interactive Multiplayer port of Doom was infamously put together in just ten weeks, owed to the CEO of Art Data severely underestimating how much time and work would be needed to develop it.
• Dragon Age II was developed and completed in only nine months. The shortframe shows through in the game's quality such as repeated environments and assets, odd camera angles, and an underdeveloped 3rd act. It also had the shortest dev time in the Dragon Age series compared to Origins (7 years), Inquisition (4 years), and the ongoing Dreadwolf (7+ years).
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was infamous for having a rather short development period, even for its time. Howard Scott Warshaw, the game's programmer, was given only five weeks to write and develop the game's coding from scratch in order to meet the upcoming holiday release date. Warshaw's previous games were noted to take at least a few months to make, explaining E.T.'s finicky controls and confusing gameplay.
• Fallout: New Vegas was developed in 18 months, intended to follow up on the success of Fallout 3 without getting into the release window for Skyrim, although it used the engine from 3 which cut down development time. The end result was acclaimed from a story perspective, but filled with massive technical issues that the dev team simply didn't have time to fix before launch. Patches later fixed many of these issues, but some bugs have gone unpatched to this day.
• The iconic pause music in GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 took about 20 minutes for composer Grant Kirkhope to create.
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was developed in nine months, initially intended to be a Grand Theft Auto III expansion. Presumably because of this, the game's map has lot of unpolished areas, particularly in the western portion.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask received its Japanese release in April 2000, just seventeen months after the release of its previous opus Ocarina of Time. For reference, every mainline 3-D Zelda title since then has required 3-6 years of development time. The original plan was to re-release Ocarina of Time with higher difficulty and scrambled levels, which they later did when porting it to the GameCube as Ocarina of Time Master Quest. Consequently, the development team was given a very small window to make a sequel, leading to elements like the three-day time loop mechanic, reused character models in the parallel world of Termina, and only four dungeons compared to Ocarina of Time's nine. Against all odds, Majora's Mask garnered the same amount of widespread acclaim as its predecessor.
• Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 7 were both developed in only three months to meet Capcom's strict deadlines (2 gets bonus points for having been completed almost entirely in the developers' downtime).
• Mortal Kombat Advance was farmed out by Midway to developer Virtucraft to complete in a mere two months in order to make the Christmas holiday. The finished product is one of the most infamous Obvious Beta releases of all time.
• "Game jams" challenge developers (usually extremely small teams of two or three people) to make a functional game based on a specific theme in a very short space of time, often as little as 24 hours. The games produced are necessarily quite simple and often make liberal use of stock assets. For example, Cataclysm was developed over a weekend.
• Spec Ops: The Line reportedly had every single voice-line recorded during the same day. By the end, the voice actors were just as tired and weary as the characters they were portraying - which was wholly intentional.
• Super Smash Bros. Melee was infamously developed within a mere 13 months and under extremely stressful crunch.
• Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are known for their unique production method of working on multiple projects simultaneously, making heavy use of reusing settings, assets and gameplay across their titles to ensure that development time spent on one game can significantly expedite work on future games. The Like a Dragon series is 13 mainline games deep (counting The Kaito Files) across just 19 years with multiple noteworthy spin-offs and remakes released during that time as well. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name had the bulk of its development done in just six months, an accomplishment that is virtually unheard of for any major game studio.
• Tomb Raider II was developed in 8 months.

Web Animation

• This is the reason Battle for BFDI was split into two separate shows (Battle for BFB and The Power of Two). According to Cary Huang, he wanted to release episodes of BFB at a rapid pace, but the story that was being told became too expansive to be animated quickly, so the big overarching story would be kept for TPOT and BFB would be kept to the comedic tone of the earlier seasons of BFDI. As a result, BFB reached its conclusion in less than a year and only one new episode of TPOT at most comes out per year. Also, each episode would be animated and released at a monthly schedule, making a short production time. Impressive when you consider only two people were behind it.

Webcomics

• mezzacotta: Comments on a Postcard, as part of its joke (it's just annotations without comics), has its submissions published within just a few days. Authors can also read upcoming submissions, which can result in comics even just one day apart having references to each other.

Web Videos

• In his review of That Nazty Nuisance, The Cinema Snob admits to not remembering much about its predecessor The Devil with Hitler because he watched it, wrote the review script, filmed it, edited it, and posted it in the same day.
• The Channel Awesome films had infamously rushed productions, with shooting schedules that spanned just about a week long. This led to increasingly hectic shoots as each successive special grew longer, on top of having to film crossover reviews in the same time frame, culminating in the cast of To Boldly Flee having to shoot a three-and-half hour long movie over the course of a few days. A film professional explicitly confirmed their production was way too short.
• For the 2022 Christmas special for Economy Watch, David was able to plan, write, shoot, edit and release the episode in under a month, compared to the shorter holiday special "A Very Hoarder Christmas", which took nearly twice as long. David was surprised with how quickly he was able to make the entire episode, despite a lot going on in his life during that time.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius was reportedly put on incredibly tight production deadlines, with the various departments each being given a week and a half for each 11-minute episode (three total weeks for the half hour/22-minute show). Some of this insane truncation was alleviated by how it was a CGI cartoon (meaning assets could be reused, and creatives could be economical by limiting one new location and one new character per episode that could also be recycled), but this did come at the cost of a very hectic cycling of modelling, layout, animation, and lighting teams between episodes every other week, and led to many scripts being written on the fly.
• Classic Disney Shorts:
  • "Plane Crazy", the pilot short for the Mickey Mouse series, began development in March 1928 after Walt Disney learned he was fired from producing the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series, and was ready for a test screening in May. Ub Iwerks animated the whole film in just two weeks, at a rate of 700 drawings per day, in secret while the other animators worked on the remaining Oswald shorts on their contract.
  • "The New Spirit", a special Donald Duck short produced for the U.S. Treasury Department, was commissioned in December 1941, and the studio was given a six-week deadline to have it ready by tax season in February 1942 (Tax Day fell on March 15th back then).
• A rather odd example from Family Guy: As mentioned above, episodes of the show usually take about nine months to animate. However, "Ocean's Three and a Half," which aired in February 2009, features a lengthy cutaway gag of Peter on the receiving end of a rant from Christian Bale, using the audio from a real-life diatribe that Bale had screamed on a movie set just two weeks prior. The animators cut other scenes from the episode short and hastily animated a simple visual of an old-fashioned tape recorder to play during the scene, which allowed the dialogue to be added at an unheard-of pace for the show^note For whatever reason the Bale clip was only shown when the episode first aired, all reruns and the DVD/BluRay release use the original scenes. Fortunately the clip is on YouTube.
• The black-and-white Looney Tunes cartoons directed by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett in the late 1930s had strict deadlines of just four weeks to slam together each cartoon.
• Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer was completed in just three months, a record at the time.
• South Park: Because of the show's crude style and sophisticated rendering software, episodes are able to be produced and aired within the span of anywhere from a few weeks to a few days (most animated shows take months to complete just one episode), with adjustments being made on the fly whenever necessary. Crude storyboards are made on a whiteboard during the writers room and are sent to the animation team within the first day while they are still conceptualizing the rest of the story. This near-complete avoidance of Production Lead Time consequently results in the series being immensely topical, responding to current events almost immediately after they occur (though this once backfired on them during the 2016 Presidential Election arc). A documentary about the production of South Park was even titled 6 Days to Air.

In-Universe Examples

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development: In-Universe, it is revealed that the infamous The Fantastic Four was an example of this. Apparently, Ron Howard was told that his company's license to Fantastic Four would expire unless he did a movie on it within six days, which he promptly did by using the bartenders at the party this was revealed.

Web Animation

• Exaggerated in the GoAnimate video "Dora Makes A New Show And Gets Grounded", where Dora is able to pitch a show, get greenlit, and produce the entire first episode from the screenplay to post-production in only a few hours.

Western Animation

• Phineas and Ferb: The title characters spend most episodes building professional-quality creations within the span of a day. Among other creations, these include a hit song (stated to take most of the morning), a movie (where highly technical post-production only takes minutes) and amusement rides with parts being supplied in the time it takes to go grocery shopping.

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