Calgary: The teenage boy, decorated in sacrificial face paint, is forced back onto a stone altar by two elaborately dressed guards. A hand bearing a knife comes down to his chest and he screams - "NO!" "Go to glory," says the guard, bringing the knife down further still. "Enough," says a voice off to one side. The director yells "Cut" and the scene ends.

This scene, one of the last shot on Regina-based Minds Eye Pictures' series MythQuest, before production wrapped for the year and post commenced at Vancouver's Northwest Imaging and FX, is typical of the show which takes two teenage children from the workaday world and drops them into a realm of fantasy.

The series is something of a travelogue of myths and legends from around the world, with the lead characters catapulted into the action by way of their archeologist father's computer, which connects to the Alterworld, where the myths play out.

Budgeted at $22 million for 13 hours, the show is a combination of CGI and live action, "and that adds costs," says executive producer Kevin DeWalt. And that is just the beginning. "Other than four or five leads, [major components of each] episode have to be changed every week. That's expensive. But it's worth it because it's unique. There's mythology in most cultures, it's the essence of the cultural belief. It's an entertaining show and a way to subtly teach kids about mythology."

By its nature, MythQuest makes for an elaborate shoot: although the subject matter of each episode fits into the loose category of "myths," coming as the stories do from all over the world, there is precious little in the way of costumery or even sets that can be readily reused when one week's episode is set in ancient Japan and the next week's concerns a battle between two tribes of plains Indians.

Series producer (with Knut Winkler and Lienhard Wawrzyn) Ray Sager says MythQuest is "almost like an anthology series; it's a show that has a series [framework] but is also an anthology. You have to be extremely creative in how you use the sets."

The show's sets are a world in themselves: the kids always begin their adventures in the real world in a detailed house set composed of six rooms. The series cleverly reuses one other set for the majority of the adventures - an unadorned maze of corridors and rooms that looks like it could be constructed from stone - dressing it up to look like, by turns, a Mayan temple, a medieval castle or the labyrinth of the Minotaur.

"We can change the lighting to give each show a different look. Because we're using Styrofoam surfaces we can re-adapt so the blocks can be very wide or tight, so the wall finishings all look different. The designer was able to allow us to mix and match so you wouldn't be able to see [that the set used in each show is the same one] unless you were looking for it."

Says Sager: "I'm surprised at how fast the sets go up. To prep in seven days you really have to get the stuff up."