The devil made them do it: artists create a unique style for an animated series on ShowTime. (broadcast).(Brief Article)

One look and it is quite obvious that the folks at Sextant Entertainment and Peafur Production were feeling a bit devilish when they created the new animated comedy series "The Mr. Hell Show." Appearing on the recently launched ShowTime Next channel and on the UK's BBC, the series features 13 24-minute shows made up of eight to nine sketches that star Mr. Hell--a sarcastic anti-hero--and a cast of equally warped recurring characters.

"Mr. Hell, the politically incorrect host, is the cynical glue that binds together the various sketches and bits of weirdness," says Peafur's David Freedman. "The show has a dark, twisted sense of humor that focuses on human cruelty." With plots that take jabs at Switzerland's political neutrality, the British royal family, and even haute couture, "you either get the humor, or you don't," he notes. "It's definitely not for children." Freedman along with Alan Gilbey are the show's executive producers, creators, and writers.

"The Mr. Hell Show" is a fully animated series created using what production company Sexton calls "Hell-mation," a style of 3D computer-animated cutouts assembled and designed to simulate 2D cel animation. "All our characters are like paper dolls, built inside a computer and then manipulated by animators," says Freedman. "We've combined these cutout puppets with cutting-edge computer technology for a new look."

The characters were conceived at Peafur's London studio. Next, the designs were sent to Sextant in Vancouver, Canada, where the characters were constructed and animated. For each character, the artists selected one of several differently sized 3D scalable wireframe armatures, or skeletons, created in Alias| Wavefront's Maya running on NT-based workstations from SGI. Then they attached a flat texture covering, which mimicked "paper" clothes but contained the character's facial structure, hair, clothing, and more, giving it a unique appearance.

Using Maya, the artists animated the characters, which were given a limited range of motion. This was used to the show's advantage in ...