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Mystery Skools

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MSA: Hellbent Intro Boards (Early Version)

For those who are interested, this was my first pass for the intro sequence for Hellbent. It had a few cool dynamic shots that I wish I could have kept in the final video, but wasn’t able to fit it in.

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You Made Me Strong! 

hellbent was incredible and the gut punch i received from this panel of Lewis was worth it

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Day 20: Breakable

Careful Lewis, your heart is more fragile than you think.

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BOOP BOOP BA DOOP DOO DO BOOP BA DOOP BOOP BOOP HAUNTED DOLL WATCH

Vivi: I combed eBay to find the most haunted-sounding doll possible-

Lewis: If you want my honest- right now, just gut check, uh, I’m very nervous

Arthur: I- this is- I’m praying-

Vivi: (opening box) Wait wait wait don’t look! Keep your eyes closed!

Arthur: Oh god-

Vivi: His name is Marvin. Just picture a Marvin in you’re head and- eugh, okay, don’t look!

(Lewis and Arthur giggling) Okay???

Vivi: Don’t look...! don’t look...! You’re not looking...! You’re waiting...! Aaaaaaaaand now! (reveals horrifying haunted doll)

(Lewis and Arthur screaming) Lewis: Oh god! Aaaaaa! His eyes?!   Arthur: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! NOoOOOoOoOooooo!

Arthur: It’s so much worse than I thought it would be!

Vivi: (moves the dolls hands to clap)

Lewis: NO, please don’t haha, please!

Arthur: What are his hands made out of to make that sound?!

Vivi: bOnes!!

(All three laughing)

(Video Reference to Haunted Doll Watch)

So I saw @chantillyxlacey post about Mystery Skulls Animated but podcasters like MBMBAM, which is like, two of my most favoritist thingsss. SO of course I had to crank this out last night because hoLY FRICK its an amazing concept

Also, happy belated birthday @chantillyxlacey !

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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.

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The Tire Pop

TheCartoonKitty

This shot was far and away the most technically demanding shot in Hellbent

So here’s how we managed it.

Even from the animatic it was pretty obvious it was going to be hard. The camera was moving dynamically past an animating background with a SFX element in focus. 

It was pretty clear to me this shot was going to need to be partly or fully 3d.

We’ve used 3d reference in the videos before. But this was the first time it would be IN the actual video, so I needed to convince Ben it could be done and blended in a way that wouldn’t stand out awfully against Kressent’s beautiful backgrounds. 

I was able to get started on this shot pretty early but that turned out to be a double sided sword. I had time to try things but I didn’t have character animation or even final background reference until much later. 

So I started blocking it out in 3d.

(old bg colors from the con preview)

Matching the 2d truck and van in 3d would have been near impossible, so I opted to use the 2d flash asset we already had.

Then the flash asset match moved manually to the 3d reference.

The shot was slightly re-timed from this version

(rendering the background  to a video format flash can play turned out to be a real pain) Next up was set dressing

Heilos got me a ton of nice little assets to throw around the scene

and starrrrsssss

I used blender and cycles for rendering. Lots of janky tricks. but here’s the main one for getting alpha textures to work nicely on the 2d billboards.

For weirdos who are into that kind of thing.

Then it was just a matter of animating the Fire moving through a windscreen and a complex 3D camera move.

Easy!

At this point I had the 3d render of the background

And a folder of swf files for each element in the shot. (using PBnDumbexport)

And it was up to AE to glue all this stuff together

Over all I’m pretty happy with how this shot turned out, few problems, some I didn’t even notice until doing this write up.

Kressent was literally killing herself with backgrounds so there was actually another shot that used this 3D background

software used flash cs6, after effects cc, blender 2.7

Here’s a discord I’m on a lot if you have any questions:

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frosty girls❄️

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oh me? I love Arthur 

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Same energy

Vivi has really risen on my ‘fav MSA character’ pretty quickly after Hellbent! 

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this just in: local dog not very good at being a dog bc he’s not a dog

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made a shiromori and mystery swap design!!

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MSA Character Page Links

I’ve gotten a couple questions about this so i’m gonna drop some hot links for ya’ll since there’s plenty of new people that haven’t seen these on Ben’s tumblr page. MSA Main Character Profiles: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/CharacterProfiles -Shiromori  http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/145080256943/the-big-ol-shiromori-post-so-this-is-a-long-time -Shiro’s weapon turnaround: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/143459868703/heilos-freaking-out-shear-design-and

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MSA Side Character Profiles: -Lance:  http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/109367000868/arthurs-uncle-lance-owner-and-head-mechanic-at -Galaham:  http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/104646397768/arthurs-pet-hamster-galahad-while-that-is-his -Duet and Chloe: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/113137538073/duet-duet-is-the-owner-of-tome-tomb-the-used - Mr. and Mrs. Pepper: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/110783256058/mr-and-mrs-pepper-owners-and-chefs-of-the -The Pepper Family: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/143513806968/pepper-family-so-on-our-2-million-views-mark-for -The Yukino Family: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/159626880238/due-to-popular-request-here-is-some-concept-art ———————————————————————————————————– -MSA Character Height Chart: http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/113232739688/for-handy-reference-here-is-all-of-the-characters MSA Prototype Designs:  http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/post/101818745548/character-sketches-the-prototypes-though-these

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**OH GOODNESS** I couldn’t help myself, Vivi’s face was too cute to pass up

  @mysterybensmysteryblog

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Here’s my half of the Illustrations that were done for Mystery Skulls Animated-”Hellbent”. Hope these make some nice wallpapers for people! I had a blast working on them and definitely some of my best vector work to date. Enjoy! Here’s all 8 of them at 1920 x 1080 resolution: https://imgur.com/a/dOAgv7c

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We decided to post high quality versions of the illustration in commemoration of the million view milestone. we got a few requests to make them wallpapers! thank you guys so much for all your support and we hope you enjoy!