Evan Dorkin
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Welcome To Eltingville Storyboards (Act 1, pgs 24-31, 38-46)
🕑 Added 2025-12-16 06:29:34 +0000 UTCThis storyboard segment brings us to the end of the D&D cold opening sequence.
And I mean cold, because it's the freeze spell scene. I hate freeze spells!
This was the only sequence that had a major revision. Originally the script called for Lord Atrocity to attack Sir Pete with a tentacled brain monster that he created with his sorcerer's staff. The monster was supposed to chew Pete up and spit his severed out at his comrades. We ran into a time constraint, and the scene needed to be shortened. I came up with the idea of Lord Atrocity using a freeze spell, Stephen boarded the new scene, and director Chuck Sheetz revised Stephen DeStefano's board to add some beats. I was bummed out by losing the monster but I think the freeze spell worked out pretty well, because the anti-freeze spell potion freezing was a decent gag. And if you look carefully, or slow down the scene, you can see Josh's brains fly out when Bill smashes his frozen head open.
NOTES:
Page 26-27: Here you can see Chuck Sheetz' revisions on the board. The really simple drawings throughout the storyboards are revisions he did as he went through the script and boards. Storyboards generally don't need to be pretty, they need to instruct the animators and tell the story.
Page 39: Looks like sc. 28, panel A is taken from one of my design drawings. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, sometimes Stephen felt one of my existing drawings worked to establish a scene, so he dropped them in. You can tell which drawings are mine because they aren't as fluid and animated as Stephen's but aren't as perfunctory as Chuck's. If that makes any sense. They look like my drawings, that's a better way to put it.
Pages 32-37. There are no pages 32-37. I'm guessing those pages were originally of the monster bit. I can't be sure because I don't see the boards for that scene anywhere at hand. If/when I find them I'll scan them for this series.
Pg 43: Jerry's god-hand. I love Stephen's drawing of the hand.
Pg 45-46: The game is over, and we meet our "heroes" properly. And they're fighting, of course. The panel of Bill is by Chuck Sheetz.
One of the things I was hoping we could do in the show was to continue the D&D game in throughout the series. The campaign would be an ongoing running gag, maybe used for more cold openings. So there's be a show-within-a-show at times. Bill, Josh and Pete's characters would be killed and resurrected over and over again, their deaths due to stupidity and/or in-fighting. Jerry would always be the DM and provide all the voices of the villains and NPCs. I think it would have been pretty cool.
That's it for now. When I continue with the posts we'll get deeper into the basement scenes.
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
Act 1, pgs 1-14a can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-act-1-121083950
Act 1, pgs 15-23a can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-act-1-121897537
More information on the deleted monster scene can be seen here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-d-d-109137292
Stephen DeStefano can now be found here on Patreon as well as on Bluesky: @stephendestefano.bsky.social
Comments
Sean Lane
These are so neat!
