Monster By Mistake animators are breaking new ground with Houdini software by it putting to work on an entire series.

Produced by Toronto’s Catapult Productions and Cambium Entertainment, Monster By Mistake is an animated children’s series that debuted in 1997 on ytv as a half-hour Halloween special.

Kim Davidson, president of Catapult and of Side Effects Software, the company which designs and distributes Houdini, and animation director Mark Mayerson came up with the story about a young boy named Warren who gets mixed up in a magic spell and turns into a monster every time he sneezes.

Feeling responsible for her brother’s misfortune, Warren’s big sister Tracy works hard to find a way to lift the spell cast on her brother by Gorgool, a creature who has been trapped in a magical ball and exiled to Earth. The powerful jewel of Fenrath, triggered by a magic spell, will release Gorgool and restore his deadly powers. He tricks the kids into helping him, and just as Warren is about to complete the spell he sneezes, the spell is ruined, Gorgool remains a prisoner and the eight-year-old boy is a big blue part-time monster.

Most of the characters in the original half-hour special were sculpted and input into Prisms using Personal Digitizer from Immersion, with the rest of the modeling done directly in Prisms. Artwork from the special that is being used for the series, such as recurring characters, has been converted to Houdini.

Aside from Adobe Photoshop, which is being used to paint textures, everything, including modeling, lighting, animation, rendering and compositing, is done using Houdini.

The major benefit of producing the entire show in Houdini, according to Mayerson, is that it is a totally open system allowing animators to write tools and put them directly into the software, which speeds production flow.

The software itself gives the user the ability to write macros, which become part of the software menu, and once installed become part of the package proper. Anything that can be written can be combined with Houdini. ‘It is efficient for us to always be in the package,’ says Mayerson.

As an open and customizable software, Davidson says the largest customer base for Houdini has traditionally been for effects work, but it is a natural for series production.

‘I think Houdini is an emerging thing,’ says Davidson. ‘It is really best for tv, it has got all the features end to end, the completeness is important. And it’s really open and customizable, so when we are doing a little task over and over we can write a script or a custom ui that makes it easier for the animator.’

Monster By Mistake is the first 3D animated series to be fully animated in Toronto, with everything (except post, which is taking place just down the street on the Jaleo system at Optix) being done under one roof. Crunch is handling the audio.

Offline editing is taking place in-house on an Avid at 24 frames per second as opposed to 30, which makes the animation look less ‘floaty.’ It is then converted back to 30 frames per second for the online.

Any given episode of Monster By Mistake contains 350 shots, which according to Mayerson is high volume compared to other types of work done in town to date.

The budget for the series is around $6 million for 13 episodes. Season one will air on ytv in Canada in September and the show has been sold throughout Europe and other territories including Israel, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and the Philippines.

Animation is taking place at Studio 345, a downtown Toronto locale set up to facilitate production on the series which Davidson and Cambium exec producer Arnie Zipursky hope to make a permanent studio for new projects and service work.

To accompany the show, Catapult and Cambium are creating their first new media project, Monster By Mistake The Online Adventure, consisting of interactive games with some educational elements that work in conjunction with, and change with, the series.

The site will be broken up into different areas, allowing the visitor to go wherever they want. By going to Warren’s tree house, the visitor will be able to play trivia games, learn story details, ask questions about the show and have online discussions with other kids around the world.

In addition, visitors will be able to wander through the animated sets used in the series, and by going into Warren’s house they can participate in an interactive course on character animation.

Catapult has a couple of other projects in the works which Davidson recently shopped around at natpe, The Professor and Wagstaff, about a professor and his robot, and ‘Bot Squad, about three misfit robots trying to fit into society.