Left 4 Dead - WIP #1 version of the Cinematic Intro

What you see below is the first half of the very first animatic we created for the Left 4 Dead intro movie back in early July. As you can see, we were still using the old character models for Francis, Zoey and Bill. In fact, one of the reasons that the Survivor models were redesigned was that the original meshes did not hold up well under the demands of the facial animation that was required for both the game and the intro movie. Over the course of the next couple of weeks of refining the story, we found that the romantic tension between Zoey and Francis that you see in this version did not playtest well, as it proved to be a distraction from the gravity of the Survivors' desperate situation. As a result, this was dropped from subsequent versions. Later in the piece, when the hunter pounces on Louis, the timing of Louis's line and the hunter's pounce consistently came off as comedic, which was certainly not the intended effect.