Five orphaned children from war-torn planets band together for survival in a universe under attack in Brats of the Lost Nebula, a sci-fi adventure series combining cg animation with puppetry.

Thirteen episodes of the fast-paced, outer-space series, produced by Toronto’s Decode Entertainment and Jim Henson Television and Wandering Monkey, both out of Los Angeles, hit ytv airwaves in November and another 13 are on the way.

A non-violent action series, Brats of the Lost Nebula is the brainchild of Wandering Monkey executive producer Dan Clark. Decode, which according to producer John Delmage ‘has a keen interest in cg animation,’ was onboard pretty much from the beginning almost two years ago. Toronto’s C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures was brought in to handle creation of cg elements.

Brats boasts a cast of hip space kids who are a mix of traditional hand puppet and animatronic creations from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in l.a.

The Brat pack consists of Zadam, the leader, a fast-talking, funny 14-year-old; his tough little sister Triply; Duncan from Yarlon, a planet of muscle-bound creatures; Ryle, a Tranoid obsessed with sports; and Lavana, a lover of life from the planet Loza.

When the puppets touched down in Toronto in early June, they were shot on Digital Betacam in studio on sets and in front of green screens by dop Rhett Morita. Both the characters and sets are a mix of live-action elements, with cg animation created by C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures.

Under the direction of animation director Kyle Menzies and Colin Cunningham, who was taking his first crack in the role of animation director, c.o.r.e. got in on the series in the spring of last year. Their mission: pull off 385 high-quality shots in a short May-to-December time frame. Their strategy: split up into two teams of seven animators, allowing them to work on two scenes at once.

It was up to the c.o.r.e. crew to take the series into outer space, extend sets making them appear bigger than they actually were, create the Planetoid where the Brats live, and animate the Brat cruisers and Shock Warriors responsible for the destruction of the Brats’ home planets.

A full-size, seven-foot-tall model of a Shock Warrior – ‘a bipedal cannon/starcruiser that can fly, charge, swim, burrow, burn or cut their way through just about anything’ – was constructed on set. A puppeteer wore it like a backpack and controlled its movements for any shots where the evil beast interacts with other puppets or is shown close-up.

Scenes involving the Shock hurtling through space feature a cg version of the warrior, which involved scanning pieces of a disassembled Shock into the computer that at first glance proved to be a geometrical nightmare for the animators.

‘Its head is so detailed,’ says Cunningham. ‘The surface is full of all these nooks and crannies, and when we first looked at it we had no idea how we were going to get it into the computer, the geometry was so complex.’

After experimenting with several different methods, including sending it out to be laser scanned, the team at c.o.r.e. settled on a digitizing robotic arm to get the job done.

Once all the warrior’s body parts were scanned in Houdini, the animators pieced them together like a puzzle, forming the complete Shock, and when everything was snapped into place, texture was added.

With a 35mm camera, Cunningham photographed the Shock model from all angles. The pictures were developed on photo cd, scanned directly into the computer and lined up, matching all the features together so that when the action jumps from a close-up shot to cg the transition is seamless.

To give the galactic sets more detail and depth, animators took shots of puppets on green screen and added matte paintings of vistas and cliffs. Actual rock elements were photographed on set then layered and composited in ice.

Scenes of the Planetoid were all cg, while shots that involved the Brats looking out from the Planetoid into space were matte paintings.

Optix Digital Post & FX also got in on the job, looking after the Avid offline editing. Senior editors Calvin Grant and Bruce Lange cut simultaneously on Avid 4000 Media Composers for the first two months. Online compositing and effects were done by George Levai and David Hedley on two Jaleo suites.

Computer tie lines ran from Optix to c.o.r.e. so that all cg images could be imported directly into their systems without ever needing to go to tape.