Thanks to the momentum generated by sales of nearly 3 million DVD box sets and repeated cable airings, Fox’s Family Guy is back by popular demand after its 2002 cancellation in season three. That means executive producer, creator and voice actor Seth MacFarlane is jamming again with veteran producer Kara Vallow and supervising director Peter Shin to crank out a highly-anticipated fourth season. But this time it’s with a new crew of animators who must breathe life back into the characters that audiences grew to love. The good news is that the new season’s budget is bigger and the pipeline has evolved with streamlined software and plug-ins.

Two Korean production facilities, Yeson Animation and Grimsaem Studios, help create the show’s key layouts for this season’s 35 episodes (compared to last season’s 13). Whereas other shows draw key poses onto animation paper, Shin says, "Our boards are much more intense because we try to do the layouts on the storyboard. So if The Simpsons has maybe 100 pages worth of storyboard for one act, we would have maybe 500 pages. We do much more posed storyboards."

Workflow has also changed. Animatic editors and animation producer Shannon Smith now use Final Cut Pro v4.5, a switch from season three’s Adobe Premiere Pro. The shift to Macs allows editors to use BIAS Peak, a plug-in that can modify character dialogue. Vallow explains, "[Seth] likes to play around with the speed of the dialogue a lot." With BIAS, the production team can speed up dialogue by 10 percent.

Lead compositor Chad Katona and crew work with Toon Boom’s US Animation v5.3 which provides digital ink and paint applications in addition to its compositing functions. This season, Katona color-corrects retakes in the Los Angeles office as opposed to retouching in Korea. Vallow says, "[Katona] can bring files in from our overseas studio and do minor animation fixes like re-timing and re-fielding. He can drop in simple elements from Photoshop CS and do fixes and level separations." Katona renders as many as eight layers in Adobe After Effects, working in 24 fps and then rendering it out at 30 fps.

Instead of all hand-drawn backgrounds, the overseas studios have progressed to incorporating animations done in Maya, where backgrounds can be moved toward and away from the camera. With perspective shots, MacFarlane says, "You see the road receding in the distance, and if that’s hand-drawn often times it looks wavy and kind of sloppy." Such CG scenes can be used over and over.

With a strong previous season, Shin and the crew are most concerned with carrying over the same look. However, complex new ideas and storylines force the crew to continue to evolve. Shin cites season three’s Emission Impossible episode, where various vehicles drive and fly through shots: "To try to draw all those ships moving around would be pretty difficult." The show hired an outside CGI house to do the flying planes using Autodesk 3ds Max. But the artists did all the characters traditionally because, he continues, "We didn’t want the look to pop all of a sudden. The planes came out really good in CGI, and we put the traditional animation on top of it. "Whereas Futurama uses it almost every time with these type of scenes, The Family Guy only uses it for special scenes."