MSA: Hellbent Intro Boards (Final Version)
Adding a little intro section for the beginning of Hellbent was something we decided to implement very early on in preproduction. Due to the song itself being so short, we knew that it was nearly impossible to include everything we wanted to have happen within just the confines of the song, so we needed some extra time in the beginning to set things up before everything went to… well, you know haha.
The intro was a collaborative effort largely between me and @koalacola. I did a first pass (which I’ll put up in a separate post), while he did a separate first pass. Then, picking and expanding upon elements from both our passes, I put together and timed out the final version that ended up in the video.
Because this section is not primarily driven by music and there is no dialogue, sound was a huge factor of this intro that I felt we had to get right (since we’re trying to make the atmosphere somewhat scary for poor Arthur). I thus made a temp sound track to get a good feel of what we’re going for (please forgive the more silly sound effects in this animatic). I was absolutely smitten when I heard Strelok’s final pass for the sound design for this section, and I can’t thank him enough for fully realizing the eerie atmosphere I was hoping we could achieve.
One more piece of trivia: This video was the first time that we had people other than Ben do a majority of the storyboard and animatic. For Ghost and Freaking Out, Ben had pretty much storyboarded and timed out everything. For this project, I was given the opportunity to do the exciting yet daunting task of helping board out the next Mystery Skulls installment largely from scratch. Ben provided the outline as well as some specific things he wanted to see in the story, but everything else was fair game (under his supervision of course haha).
Thanks for reading through my rambles on this intro. It’s one of my personal favorite pieces of MSA material I’ve had the honor worked on, and I hope you’ve all enjoyed it as much as I had working on it.
Isaiah and Blake have been helping us for a long time and their animation and storyboarding skills have been invaluable to the entire Mystery Skulls Animated production on top of being amazing friends. Strelok did a fantasic job on helping us with sound design for the intro as well.
