Jane followed their color schemes very faithfully, and I simply laid the character on top and tuned the flat colors until they felt appropriate. The colors in Hades are strikingly unique, and I thought departing from them would be doing the game a disservice. That’s really to the credit of our background artist Jane Bak and the artists at Supergiant who created such lovely source material. How did you go about achieving this richness? The colours in the scene are really vivid and violent. I didn’t even give Weilin any sort of design for the Zeus cloud, I figured his take would be thoughtful and interesting without it. In the case of Chengxi Huang and Weilin Zhang, who animated the swordplay scenes, I handed them my boards and told them they could do whatever they wanted as long as they kept the staging the same. Knowing this, I made it a point to give as much freedom to the animators as possible. It wasn’t so much of a process as it was just second nature for all of us. Every one of the animators on this project had worked in anime before, and every one had animated fight scenes many times. The majority of the team was already well-versed in action. The trailer contains very action-oriented fight scenes. Animatic clip for Hades provided by Spencer Wan / Studio Grackle. I gave them the option to pick which scenes they wanted, but to my surprise they each picked the exact ones I boarded for them. I think the only thing really worth mentioning is that since I knew who I wanted my team to be, I boarded the scenes with each individual animator in mind. I spent about twenty minutes scribbling out some thumbnails on the subway, drew a slightly more presentable version for Supergiant that night, it got approved, and we moved on. We were doing all our animation here, so we didn’t need tight boards. Most storyboards you see out of larger studios these days tend to be very clean and very posed out, since they’re sending them overseas to be animated. I storyboarded this the old fashioned way, which is to say very quickly and loosely. Can you tell us about your storyboarding process? A global pandemic really puts a damper on your motivation for artistic pursuits, and makes managing a team a little more complicated. The biggest challenge was just dealing with the conditions of the time. I’ve never worked with a client so trusting and accommodating, and we were really able to do our best work with the freedom they gave us. Working with Supergiant was also a wonderful experience. Most of us had already worked with each other for years before coming together for this, so although it was our first project, our pipeline was able to function more like that of a more seasoned studio. Somehow the whole experience was shockingly smooth. What was it like putting this project together, and what were the biggest challenges you faced on it? Let’s meet the team which brought Hades to life.ĭirector: Spencer Wan / Creative Consultant: Jen Zee / Key Animation: Chengxi Huang, Gem, Hartova Maverick, Weilin Zhang / Clean Up and Color: Robby Cook / In-Between Animation: Robby Cook / Backgrounds: Jane Bak / Compositing: Craig Nowicki / Sound Design: Lauren Crist / Score: Darren Korb Your trailer for Hades has fans excited. He tells us about the storyboarding process, gives insight into how the vivid backgrounds were created, and highlighted work from some of Studio Grackle’s key personnel. We interviewed Spencer to hear what this process was like, and how he purpose built the team to meet Supergiant’s brief. He went about setting up a team, enlisting some of the most skilled animators from his network and bringing them under one banner: Studio Grackle. To animate at such an epic scale, Spencer knew that he too would need to call on a pantheon of godly talents. Frequently.īased on Greek mythology, the game sees you play Zagreus, a rebellious son of Hades who must fight his way out of the underworld with the help of a host of Olympian gods. With challenging combat featuring colossal characters, fire-breathing demons and lightning bolts, the trailer sets the expectation that the protagonist will be returning from the River Styx. Fans of Hades, which could be described as a ‘roguelike hack-and-slash dungeon crawler,’ have been quick to praise the trailer’s action-packed anime treatment. Spencer Wan is a deft hand at putting the action into the animated, with credits on Castlevania and now a breathtaking new trailer for Supergiant Games’ Hades under his belt.

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