![]() After a few drafts, they had an outline of Annie's origin story that would deepen her character and hopefully wow players in a way her backstory never really had before. The team began thinking about how Annie might discover her powers-the initial sparks of a personality equal parts precocious and psychopathic. “She was an evil girl, and that's it,” says RiotPastaBomb. She'd made an appearance in a cinematic before, but to many Rioters she wasn't a major character in the world of Runeterra. When RiotPastaBomb and the motion graphics team began reviewing the League roster for a main character, Annie wasn't perceived as a compelling protagonist. We wanted to do something with a champion that no one else was really interested in so we wouldn't overlap with other projects.” “ But other teams were already working on some ideas for those champs. “Originally, we were gonna do a Zed piece, and then we were thinking about a Miss Fortune one,” says director Anthony “ RiotPastaBomb” Possobon. ![]() But by the end, they didn't just learn a new way to make mograph animations. ![]() It took more time to convince Riot-and themselves- that they could actually pull it off. It took some time to find a team wildly enthusiastic enough to attempt something no one at Riot (or maybe anywhere) knew how to do. Creating a multi-minute animation would require an entirely new approach to making mographs, one that could extend far beyond the standard single looping shot. It was an intriguing idea, but there was a problem: The motion graphic artists at Riot used completely different technology and techniques than traditionally trained 2D animators. Seeing the massive popularity of “mographs” like Diana's, one art director asked a deceptively simple question: What would one of these looping login screens look like as a long-form, animated story? These 2D graphics, carefully distorted to imitate motion, were an immediate hit with players and became a regular part of every new champion release. It was 2012, and the first animated login screens appeared in the League client. The “Annie team” spent a lot of time like that, debating among themselves while wallpapering their part of the building with references and sketches-a madcap studio-within-a-studio hellbent on discovering the perfect method and medium for what was to be Annie's origin story.īut the spark that started it all occurred long before there was ever a team. If you had walked to the farthest, darkest corner of Riot Games about a year ago, chances are you would have come across a small group of artists huddled together in dim lighting and deep discussion about how to make fire look like paint.
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