Dead End Paranormal Park Season 2, Episode 3 “The Trials of Barney” thumbnail pass of the wrestling match. (Basically the second half of the episode) #spoilers but only if you look too close.
So fast forward like 6+ years since I last posted on my Tumblr, I’ve moved on from art department and illustration into story departments. I work as a Story Artist, mostly on animated series. In the back of my mind I always knew I wanted to do storyboards but it took such a long time for anyone to give me that chance (and a long time for me to be good enough.) Working on Dead End Paranormal Park was so special and this episode was probably my personal favourite to work on. I remember reading something Hamish Steele wrote about the Demon Wrestling in the DeadEndia graphic novels being a love letter to Pro Wrestling and so I wanted this to be an extension of that love letter. I researched the heck out of Pro Wrestling leading up to being briefed on this episode, watching every YouTube clip and documentary I could find and fit into my schedule. I went from someone who knew very little (I’d say Glow was as much as I knew) to someone who actually yelled at my board partner “OMG The Undertaker retired!!” Anyway, I like to think that wrestling with Demon magic is kind of that extra little kick you could only get away with in animation so it was a real ride being able to sink my teeth into that fantasy. I use this post-it method when I have to do a lot of visual writing, which happens whenever I’m working on heavy action sequences like fights that are also story-heavy. Sometimes in order to get a scene working we have to shuffle sections of the script around, add and really plus things. The biggest change was making Hox a constant commentator to tie the whole sequence together (so we gave him A LOT more lines.) Some of the flashbacks originally were at the start of the script and we felt the story was stronger if we saw them during the fight so we moved them here. It was a bit of a choreography of all the parts that had to happen. I still think it was an astounding script to work with and it really helped that to me it was clear from the start what plot A (Barney’s Wrestling) B (Pugsley trying to protect Barney) and C (Norma and Courtney being DWF fans) were. And I absolutely love how all 3 come together in the end. Anyway, this post-it method was something I just started doing after being inspired by this Better Call Saul beat boards I saw on Twitter. https://twitter.com/TomSchnauz/status/1233512024350609409?s=20&t=HFN2Z93g3KgEYUqPOuoAOQ This is the absolute raw first version storyboards of this half of the ep. After that, I developed it into a first pass which we pitched internally. After that, me, my storyboard partner, Eva Figueroa and our episode’s storyboard supervisor, (storyboard lead) Max Loubaresse had a look at the entire episode and refined it some more.