CinéGroupe worked long and hard on the scripts to get the tone right. It aims to make social satirical commentary.

“There is much more emphasis on writing, comedic timing, comedic direction, deftness and nuances,” explains Katsumoto, of the show’s current incarnation. “Our challenge was finding the right tone and making it raunchy and fun, and making it intelligent. Under the sex jokes there’s an intelligence that’s woven into the series. We wanted it to have a backbone that was intelligent and smart humor.”

The biggest technical challenge, he says, was nailing down the timing and getting lifelike movement for the humanoid characters, such as Six, the cyber sex slave. “In cartoons, you can get away with squash-and- stretch,” he says. “But for humanoids, the expectation is very high. Replicating human movement was definitely a challenge.”

The show was entirely created in 3ds max, which marked a new departure for CinéGroupe, a facility that prides itself on its large xsi studio. “It seemed like the most feasible way to go with Tripping the Rift, because we had to reconstruct what had been done in 3ds max on the original short,” says CinéGroupe’s Mitch Lemire, exec producer on Tripping the Rift. “It’s a very keyframe friendly software, which allows us to animate traditionally. I’m very happy with the performance of the newest version of 3ds max. The xsi studio is more expensive, involves more people and takes longer to tweak. With the tight scheduling of a TV series, it made sense to do it this way.”

Every detail of the ship was the result of much research and discussion between the 2D and 3D artists.

Tripping the Rift’s central theme — a bunch of aliens manning a ship on its way through outer space — may not be the most original concept, and indeed, there are many references and sci-fi in-jokes, not to mention homages to Star Wars and Star Trek; but what really sets the show apart is its distinctive CGI look. If at times the pacing is a little monotonous, the same can’t be said of the show’s visuals. There’s almost too much going on.

“We really wanted to do something new,” says Lemire. “We’ve seen all the Flash series, we’ve seen King of the Hill, and everything was getting more limited, less graphic; whereas when you look at games and feature films they’re getting more realistic. We wanted to go for a more high-end theatrical look. We think the show lends itself well to it.”

A team of 40 laid out all the principal animation at CinéGroupe HQ in Montreal, where the entire first five shows of the series were completed. And a satellite studio in Malaysia with the same pipeline was set up, so that two teams could be working simultaneously — a necessity if they were to meet the demanding deadlines of TV. Some of the post was also done at Film Roman, in Los Angeles.

The main challenge, according to Lemire, was the sheer volume of characters and the time it took to establish an overall look and feel to the show. “It was a big series for volume of characters. We have close to 700 characters in 13 episodes. Fortunately, we had a good strong lead-time, which allowed us to fully develop the characters without having to worry about delivery. In traditional animation, that kind of development doesn’t get thrashed out because the schedules are too tight. So we really knew what the characters were and we talked a lot to Tom Vitale at Sci Fi Channel and Sidney Clifton [svp and head of development and programming] at Film Roman; establishing if the characters would do certain things.