The goal of this particular piece was we wanted to dive into the League of Legends universe
with a bigger more diverse cast.
I think it's just about fleshing things out, like, who are these characters?
What is the world really like that they live in?
Because when you play the game you get a very small piece of a much broader story that we
want to tell.
A cinematic of this depth leads to champion discovery, it forces us to go deeper into
understanding the characters that we're trying to portray.
For one, there's significantly more detail in the art and the textures and the models
that we're putting forth.
When we're up close and personal in someone's face like how are they going to react to a
situation, we have to really understand their personality.
We had to kind of find a balance and look for good moments where we could say something
about a character in the middle of what they were doing.
One of my favorite moments is when Draven steps in on Leona's sword, he kneels down
and he's just like "sucks to be you."
You know, he doesn't have to say it, he just has that look on his face.
The big meme that Brad was really reinforcing was just, Graves is not impressed.
Nothing impresses Graves, he's seen it all and we try to reflect that in the acting choices
that he makes throughout.
And then when you do see him get a little bit scared and you do see him get bested by
Nautilus when he barely gets his gun up in time and it's sort of shattered by the anchor,
seeing a little bit of fear in Graves is also kind of a cool moment.
Every character has to feel different, has to move different.
In League of Legends, if somebody swings an axe a certain way, Brad always describes this,
if they swing an axe a certain way no other character in the history of League can swing
it in that same way.
Because they all have their sort of animation identity.
Then on the form side it's their silhouette, you know, their proportions, their size, every
single one of those things, all those little ingredients equal the sum of making someone
a unique individual.
For Darius, you know, we went with the strong jaw, the size of his eyes, the way his lips
are, even the wideness of his nose gives him that hulking sort of alpha look.
Ahri we wanted to sell that fox-like structure to her and so there are these very minor things
done with her face and the way her eyes are spaced, and her nose, and her lips.
Of course there's the ears and the tail but even in her movement in the piece we actually
went with a very slick, sleek, sort of evasive movement style for her to bring out this fox
side.
One of the great challenges we had with the sound for the cinematic was creating something
that a player could close their eyes watching this cinematic and then instantly know that
that's the character that they know and love from the game.
From a sound perspective it always starts with foley.
Foley is basically recording all of the stuff that, sounds that a human being can actually
reproduce so it's doing a lot of armor, leather, cloth movement, footsteps.
Foley is very important for storytelling because it's animation so there's no production track
to start with so every movement of each one of these characters has to be custom hand
designed.
Leona was really difficult just because we had taken up kind of the big badass armor
space with Darius and so for Leona we actually went and we looked for different kinds of
really high pitched elements that almost had a sunshine kind of feel to them.
Musically, I definitely wanted it to feel different.
Every character needs kind of their own element and their own character musically and that
takes time to find, you know?
Because there's only so many instruments in the world.
Nautilus was really difficult because,
what does a huge dude that's a running submarine sound like, right?
When you think about it it's a pretty straight forward approach. Alright, he comes from underwater,
let's go underwater.
I think we want players to come away with this feeling a stronger connection to the
characters that they play as.
I play Jax a lot and seeing him in cinematic form gives you a lot more of an attachment
to the character.
You know I can say like, that's Jax.
And I can go, because I play Darius a lot, I can go yeah and I owned you by grabbing
you and tossing you.
It's those conversations that can happen.
It really is something made out of passion and love so that our players, when they see
it, they will enjoy it just as much as we enjoy making it.
Lets make more cool stuff for our players so that we can see it too.