The five Nickelodeon UK episodes: Lever: Brian is obsessed by a lever he finds on the desk. Stefan tries to tell him to leave it alone but he is unable to resist. Phone-in: Brian mans the switchboard while Dan and Stefan answer questions from the viewers -- if only it were that simple! Argument: Stefan has finally had enough of the unprofessional attitudes of his co-hosts and storms off! Pets: Brian brings in his pet stick insect, which seems a bit more stick-like than most stick insects. Sound FX: Using a special button, Stefan and Brian explore the exciting world of sound while Dan finishes the episode with one of his very own songs.  The three characters were rendered separately in Maya and composited together with Adobe After Effects.
| | Image: Aardman used Alias|Wavefront Maya 4 for modeling, animation and rendering. The new shorts for Nickelodeon are about half the length of the original short – approximately one and a quarter minutes. Steve Blake took on the task of animating the Yellow character as Wee Brian was working on another job at the time. Although Brian voiced the character, Blake produced the animations and successfully emulated Brian’s animation style. The original Deadline short took one and a half months of brainstorming, character designing and settling on an idea, followed by a subsequent one and a half months of actual production time. In contrast, the Nickelodeon shorts took one week to script all five episodes and ten working days for each short to run through the pipeline.  The various mouth positions for the red bloke in Maya.
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