Vancouver: Nilus the Sandman animator Chris Delaney is selling the Manila studio where he, in part, produced the first 13 episodes of the children’s show on Family Channel.

Since negotiations are ongoing with a Canadian consortium, details are few about the sale of the 5,000-square-foot plant that employs up to 400 people involved in coloring and in-betweening.

‘It was difficult to manage an overseas studio,’ says the head of Delaney & Friends in Vancouver. ‘It was more difficult than we cared to handle.’

The second 13 episodes were produced, in part, at Shanghai’s Morning Sun studio, which worked out better for Delaney because if ‘anything went wrong, we didn’t have to pay for it.’

He is negotiating with Family for another order of Nilus to get the series up to a volume of episodes handy for syndication.

Delaney & Friends is also working on an Easter sequel to The Littlest Angel Christmas special, which aired on cbc and sold 300,000 videocassettes in the u.s. Based on the success of the Easter sequel, a Halloween version will follow before the specials evolve into a series.