Season two of Pinky needed to be animated quickly and doing it in Flash as with the first season wouldn't do. Instead, Keyframe Digital came up with a CG version of Pinky.

Keyframe came up with an Autodesk 3ds Max-based production model for a CG version of Pinky. "We wanted something more rig based that would let an artist choose whether to use forward or inverse kinematics and lock their [characters'] feet to ground easily. When you rig a character it takes things to a whole other level; you can change costumes but keep animation, have a general character who you dress up with different skin, hair or sweaters and create a crowd of people. And you can put them in a 3D environment that your camera flies through like a pop-up book."

Keyframe did a quick test and showed it to Cartoon Pizza. The company liked what it saw, as did the people at CBeebies. "The first note we got from the BBC was: 'We love the new look,'" recollects Cranford. "That made it an easy sell for Sesame Workshop." But the biggest hurdle may have been the Jinkins family's "kitchen table focus group," where, according to Jinkins, his son saw the test and pronounced it "both cool and great."

"We had to do it our way" to get the episodes completed on schedule, says Green, "while keeping the visual style similar for the existing audience. We introduced the new look into the show very slowly. The characters still look 95% like they did in the first season, but we've added slight visual pluses in the way the camera moves through shots and more 3D elements in the background. We can have Pinky do things that would've been a lot more difficult in Flash."

When the virtual camera moves laterally through the scene, it creates what Green refers to as "parallax scrolling" -- a multiplane look that gives shots extra depth and the pop-up book effect Cranford describes. "The characters are still flat," Cranford adds. "We try not to rotate the camera around them, but have it go left or right or push through them. No matter which way it goes they'll always be facing camera.

A no-hassles pipeline was developed for Pinky, which allowed Keyframe to bring on and train new people easily, sometimes taking recent animation school graduates and putting them to work within two weeks.

"The beauty of all this is our pipeline our technical directors wrote at the beginning of production. It organized all the maps and created all the directories; we had automatic file check-in and check-out so no one could overwrite anyone else's files. New iterations were automatically labeled 'version 2' and the previous one dropped into an archive. The artists didn't have to worry about where to save things, all of that was done for them. All they had to do was concentrate on the animation. It sped the process up tremendously."

The no-hassles pipeline let Keyframe bring on and train new people with the greatest of ease, sometimes taking recent animation school graduates and putting them to work within two weeks. "We hired a woman who had only worked on paper [doing hand-drawn animation]. The only thing had to show her was where to find files, and make sure she ran time frames on bottom of her screen. Everything else was 'connect the arm and move it where you want. If you want new hand, look at the [onscreen] window;' we literally had a window full of hands she could choose from -- that's how easy we made the pipeline.

"To give you idea just how easy it was, we had a 'bring your kids to work day.' Darren brought his ninth grader son and his friend here. By the time they left, they were actually animating. It wasn't good animation, but they were able to understand the system."

For Monier-Williams, season two of Pinky Dinky Doo is "gorgeous, absolutely stunning. The show has always been a photo-imagery/animation mix, but this brings it a little deeper. Now the hardwood floors don't just have a 3D look, but you can see the wood grain in the floor and the sheen on it. When Pinky dances, she's not just moving right or left, she actually swings her hips and bends her knees. It's a much more fluid and richer look." The new look (together with a revamped website) has boosted the show's popularity; Monier-Williams speculates "we might wake up one day and all of a sudden we're producing season three" before quickly adding "but right now that's not in the cards."

Did the "beat the clock" pace of production and the R&D of developing the pipeline blow the season two budget into the stratosphere? According to Cranford, the reverse was true. "It boils down to how fast you can get them out and how few people you have on your labor force. By the end of the show, we had two teams of eight animators and we were putting out one show every 10 days."