Good puppet animation requires you to really push the puppet rigs to their breaking point to make more dynamic shots work. Also you need to be able to draw and redraw new parts for the rig when the rig itself can’t do what you want it to do with the basic 8 point character turnaround. Having some traditional animation experience actually really helps in this case for key posing out the character rig for more difficult shots.
Here’s actually a great example of what Lewis’s puppet rig looks like when you turn on outlines to see how it’s built and a full character rig turnaround:
(Don’t repost / remove the caption / add onto the post or use without permission)
So I decided to for fun – create some gijinka / human concepts for Mystery and the deadbeats. I also got around to creating an additional concept for a certain someone. These were a lot of fun to put together – with making them simplistic in design but with a twist. KIKI2018
Yooooooo you guys are so creative, these are really cool designs!
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.
Procrastination Queen 