Saddle up, partner!

Presenting Showdown in the Badlands: our 2.5D animated cinematic announcing a Western-themed card expansion for Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It tells the story of a lawless land in which a mining company is bleeding the land dry of Azerite—while a noble group of outlaws tries to stop them.

Showdown in the Badlands was Mooncolony’s first full-scale end-to-end production of a 2.5D Hearthstone cinematic. The script, storyboards, illustrations and 2.5D animation were all produced internally.

Let’s show these fine folks some Badlands hospitality…

Blizzard Cinematics Production

We created Showdown in the Badlands entirely from start to finish, from ideas generation and storyboarding through to illustration, animation, 2DFX and final tweaks. In all our animated projects, our teams work closely together to achieve a high-quality, cohesive result. 

After our script and storyboard was approved by Blizzard, we broke down each shot and divided the illustration work between various specialist artists. The illustration team worked with our animators to ensure that all the right elements were created on separate layers.

Then, our animation team was tasked with rigging all these elements and creating smooth, impactful movements. The final result was a super dynamic, highly polished short, full of iconic Hearthstone characters and Wild West flavour.

The Team

Director: Denis Bouyer

Art Director: Ekaterina Shapovalova

Artists: Daniele Santandrea, Alexandre Leoni, Mattia Rangoni, Dmitry Khrapovitskiy, Milica Čeliković, Yerbol Bulentayev, Allan Arello, Alex Alexandrov, Sebastian Gutierrez, Anastasia Seregina, Eugene Rudakov,

Animation Team: Greg Platt, Dean Boadana-Krone, Tim Weiser, Hadef Nidal and Alan MacEachern

Production: Amy Paterson and Katie Millar