Welcome To Eltingville Storyboards (Act 1, pgs 1-14a)

I'm finally beginning to scan the Act 1 storyboard. I figure I'll try to scan a batch for each post that makes for a cohesive chunk that isn't an overwhelming amount to click through at any one time. Maybe around 10-15 pages at a time, depending on how things break. We'll see how it works out. There's a lot to go through so I'll try to do one of these a week until it's all scanned in and posted.

About the Act 1 scans -- I was responsible for the storyboard, but I didn't feel qualified to do it myself (I also had character designs, props and backgrounds to work on, which was already more than I should have taken on. Live and learn, crash and burn). Sarah and I wanted Stephen on board (ha ha, get it?) from the start. Because the storyboard money came out of a chunk paid to us by The Cartoon Network for our overall production services, we hired and paid Stephen, and therefore we owned the physical storyboard art. I gave Stephen the art for Act 1, so I'm scanning the full act from photocopies provided by the Network. I'll be scanning Acts 2 and 3 from the original boards, and they'll be in color so you'll be able to see work done in red pencil and revision/correction panels pasted down on yellow post-it notes.

I'll add additional notes on the pages themselves if I think there's anything worth mentioning. If anyone has any questions please feel free to drop them in the comments. It's been 24 years since we worked on this pilot, so there's a lot of things I don't remember. Also, the boards can get a little confusing with numbering (9, 9a, 14, 14 a, etc) so if it looks like I missed a page in a sequence, let me know. I caught the missing 9a and was able to edit everything before I posted this. Barely.

All the Welcome to Eltingville storyboard posts will be tagged with: "WTE Storyboards" in case folks want to look through them more easily.

The opening title sequence storyboard post can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-title-93300910

Stephen DeStefano can now be found on Bluesky: @stephendestefano.bsky.social

NOTES:

Page 1 (Title): The Eltingville Club logo appears to be drawn by Stephen, based on a drawing I did. Probably based on the sign from the title sequence, with text added. "The" and "club" are clearly in Stephen's style.

Page 2: Seeing the board develop was fascinating. I was aware of some of the things that went into a storyboard, between being an animation nerd and having done clean up art on several acts of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes animated series in the late 80s (my first animation gig). But this was a learning experience, especially getting to see how a board is treated as a means to an end and not a work of art in and of itself. One of the reasons I didn't even attempt to do the storyboard myself was because I knew my limitations (I didn't have enough experience) and I knew that I'd spend ay too much time trying to pretty up my drawings. Storyboards and comics involve storytelling, but they're not a one-to-one comparison as some folks think. The board is an instructive tool for the director and animators to build their work on. It's not made for print, it doesn't need to be beautiful or necessarily on model throughout, it needs to get things done and break the script into story beats and directions. The actual director will come in and potentially alter aspects of the board, and, again, the art is there for pragmatic reasons rather than to exist as tight renderings.

I can't remember if the opening image here of the castle -- with a pan down revealing the D&D characters and goblins -- is based on my rough background drawing for the scene or if my background was based on Stephen's drawing here. I thin it might be the latter. There are a few places in the board where Stephen dropped in my design art for an establishing shot. I was suprised but realized that it made perfect sense. Why draw something that's already drawn? Especially when time is of the essense? That being said, you can see this is Stephen's work as a drawing from the details: trees, foliage, shadowy branches and especially the flowing linework are clerly his. I can only wish I could lay ink down like that.

Page 3: Here's a place where I think director Chuck Sheetz came in on a revision. The characters are drawn very simply to get the job done.

Page 6: We're definitely back to Stephen's work here on the Lord Atrocity reveal. (Fun Trivia: The name "Lord Atrocity" comes from my TTRPG days back in the 80s. He was a villain I made up for the Champions RPG campaign I ran).

Page 9: Looks to me like there's a split here between the first two panels, which are by Stephen, and the last one which is by Chuck.  

Page 12: Looks like panels 1 and 3 are my design drawings. You can see where there's a cut line showing the dropped-in image on panel 3. I liked the goblins a lot and hoped to have them return and get killed along with Bill, Pete and Josh in future D&D scenes.

Page 14: I love this/Stephen's art.

Page 14a: The main shot and background is one of my drawings, which pulls/trucks out to reveal Chuck's added characters. I won't break down all the art like this unless people want me to, I'm just finding it interesting myself after not looking at the storyboard in a long time.