This year, we're leveling everything up because this is our return
to a live opening ceremony performance post-pandemic world.
This is the most technically
ambitious production that I've been a part of.
It is such an honor to be trusted to deliver something
so special and big for our fans everywhere.
It's also filled with a lot of pressure and stress
to make sure that we get it right.
Worlds 2022 Opening Ceremony Behind The Scenes Presented by Mastercard
Worlds really is
a singular spectacle in culture.
For us, with the opening ceremony
We know that this is our chance to plant a stake in the ground
and say we are the future of sport and spectacle.
Every year we look to really up the ante.
We want to take what we've done in past ceremonies.
What we know really delights the audience and bring it all together
to deliver an even bigger, better ceremony.
Last year we went into Arcane.
We went into Piltover and Zaun
This year we wanted to show what it meant
to have the magic of Runeterra and League of Legends.
fuse into this reality in many surprising, dangerous
and wonderful ways.
It's our first year back in an arena since 2020,
and arenas are my favorite way to present the sport.
This year's opening ceremony is a 270 degree in the round,
very ambitious journey through the season of League of Legends.
We open with The Call, which is the season starts cinematic
and tells the story of the beginning of the competitive season.
We move into a Neon Strata, which is the Empyrean Skin Line
and a really exciting journey through color
and Pyke, sort of taking over the environment.
And then we conclude with this year's anthem starring Lil Nas X.
When we were creating the anthem, we knew we wanted
a North American voice on it, since this is a North America Worlds
and we instantly started looking to iconic one and only performers within NA
Lil Nas X was be top of the list if not the list for us.
So we were so excited when he was enthusiastic
about working with us and jumped in headfirst.
As president of league.
I want to make the greatest Worlds
anthem of all time.
We always aim to take our world finals
to an iconic city in whatever region that we're in.
San Francisco, of course, fits that bill.
When we think about physically putting the show into San Francisco,
the build in and of itself is easily our most ambitious.
There's 450,000
plus pounds of kit that's being put in the air.
We have five times the amount of projectors that we had in the 2019 show.
They have to turn off and on in a split second because we
can never have inside and outside projecting on the same piece,
just as one example of how complicated and how challenging this is.
We've had a pre-rig day.
The venue is going to work around the clock
for the first 96 hours that we have it between traveling
crew and local support and performers and everyone else from end to end.
I mean, this is probably a 2000 person deep production.
With that ambition comes a lot of technical requirements
and it's been a pretty challenging process to work through everything.
The holo-net this year is massive.
In 2019 we had really wide, holo-net panels.
This year we've got three very tall vertical panels
and a big influence for that was how the Champions
in the music video are these giant mechs that are taking over San Francisco.
We wanted a way to bring the scale of that physically into the room
with our performers and to show that these champions are larger than life.
Seeing our favorite champions
brought to life on stage is the best.
It's like the thing that you dream of as a league fan.
This year for the opening ceremony, we have six champions
that we're highlighting and we really wanted to do a deep dive
to understand everything possible about their abilities,
the lore behind all of the stories surrounding them, and find the bits
and pieces that we could hold on to and bring into our reality.
An example of this is Pyke and his bone skewer move.
So what we wanted to show from this was the theatrical way that Pike
pulls people closer to him without using too much extra technology
and instead using physical people on stage.
One of the biggest challenges we have is that all of the magic
comes from the holo-net.
If the choreography and the holo-net content
don't match up, those moments mean nothing to our fans.
And we won't know until we're in Chase Center
if we've mapped those moments together properly.
The pressure to
create something for League of Legends is immense
due to how many eyes are on this opening ceremony.
We've had tons of pre-vis remote.
Me and my choreography team just planning together
what style we're going to do when and just talking over zoom for weeks.
And then we only have three days with the dancers in the room
to just give them all the steps, cross our fingers.
And we have three days of production, rehearsals with lights,
technology, playback, timecode, cameras.
Director Everyone's here and we're trying to marry their own worlds.
And then we're only in San Francisco on the stage for another two
or three days, and then it's showtime, baby
We’re smiling!
Was that the first time you watched the whole thing?
Full thing hard out, from top to there.
Yeah, that gave me chills.
One of the difficulties this year was the fact that we discovered Neon Strata
as the centerpiece of the show pretty late in the game.
It wasn't until July that we really started
working with Riot Music to create a track.
We're in talks with 88 Rising about this track,
and we assumed that
maybe some of their up and coming artists would be interested
in working with us on it.
But they instantly said, Jackson wants this one,
and my heart skipped a beat.
When I first found out I was working with Jackson Wang,
I knew I had to step my game up.
We built out a choreography section
in the end of Act Two to just be with the dancers,
and it's this insane drum beat with this crazy guitar solo ending
Jackson's moment.
Today in rehearsal, Jackson was like, Wait, I want to do that.
And he learned it in 20 seconds.
And now he's fully in the dance breakdown.
And the fact he just threw himself in, it was like, so awesome
So you’re here
boom, go
Yes, I want to make this
And let you?
Let me lead. I know you’re not used to that.
Oh!
Yes. Well, I got that on camera.
Not used to it!
The challenges
of pulling off a 360 performance were extremely high
because as a choreographer
and dancers were so used to having a front and a back.
But now there's no offstage.
Right when the music starts and right when the music ends
And they're onstage the entire time, no matter which way they're facing.
Everything is meticulously choreographed.
Every single second and every single frame
because all eyes are on them the entire time.
So while the rehearsals have been hugely beneficial
and had a great impact on our prep.
We did have to make some trade offs coming in.
In addition to planning the show, we actually had to have a separate plan
for the rehearsal that was an adaptation of the show.
And once you build that plan, you have to make sure that
people don't confuse it for the show.
Because when we get back in San Francisco,
you don't want people performing the rehearsal.
You want them performing the show.
we are in the Chase Center.
The stage has been built.
I feel like the stress is really starting to set in.
In LA we had the illusion of time.
It felt like you could get everything dialed in.
But now that illusion has been shattered because the clock is ticking.
Biggest challenge of the day is that there's
so many different components to the show
that if one thing goes slowly
that has a knock on effect on everything else.
Today we had always planned on working
through each act of the opening ceremony.
We started with Neon Strata this morning with Jackson.
The timing is really, really tight.
I think our review is we know everything
that we need to fix, but I wouldn't say we necessarily saw it work.
So that means we'll be working through notes pretty late tonight.
Bone skewer is one of those things where
sometimes I wish we weren't so ambitious.
I wish we could just, like, give ourselves the easy out.
But we don't.
With bone skewer, we tried a few different ways to get it
right in L.A., a few different choreographs,
a few different movement ways we had to switch it up.
We basically flipped the choreography
so that Jackson is on the receiving end of the skewer now,
aided by some trickers who are helping him hold a pose.
I think it's landing now, but this one has been
so tricky.
After Neon Strata, we then dove into our anthem performance
to great, to have Lil Nas X in the building, got him on stage,
showed him the fly moment where he's going to be riding up the lift
to about 12, 13 feet above the stage.
Telling Lil Nas X that we were going to hoist him in the air
in the hand of a giant mech
went over way better than I ever could have imagined.
So there's absolutely zero chance that this would ever fall right?
Correct.
And also, he didn't say anything.
He'll tell you he's the guy.
I'm the guy.
I could piss in my pants. Yeah.
Oh, that's the least supportive I've ever felt in my life,
even about, like, family members and stuff.
It's really powerful to see his eight core dancers,
along with the 30 dancers that are supporting the show.
We're in a place where we've bought all the ingredients,
but we haven't necessarily cooked a meal yet.
I'm really eager, I think, for a taste test,
which might not happen till tomorrow morning.
One of the moments I'm most excited for is this year
we aren't waiting until the end to introduce our pro players
within the first 30 seconds of the call the Jumbotron raises up,
and we find our two finalist teams
right there on stage.
We treat the Jumbotron as absolutely sacred.
How we position it, where we position it, and why
we position it is a subject of hours and hours
of conversation.
This year, what we wanted to do was find a way to really bring this
sacred canvas into the story of the opening ceremony.
And a really easy way of doing that is breaking the formula
of what they've seen in any of our shows before.
Taking on any project with this kind of scale and appetite,
creative or otherwise, can be scary.
There is a lot of pressure just to chase big ideas.
Then you magnify that pressure with the realization that you're doing this live
and for all of your prep you only get one at bat.
It is
two days before the opening ceremony.
We just found out that our opening performer
won't be able to even get in the country,
so he will not be here to be a part of the show.
And we're basically just in crisis solving mode now.
It's a really good lesson in not being too precious
because with live entertainment, things change every day.
The nature of it being live, it'll be a tense time,
but we will get there.
One stumble could break the bone skewer
One late camera cut could cause us to miss a moment.
But we put in all of this prep work
because you can engineer opportunity, but you can't manufacture results.
But that space is why this is a lot of fun.
We are about
15 minutes to show and I am feeling very nervous.
I have all sorts of butterflies in my stomach and it's going to be fine.
It's going to be great.
Well, the thing is, today we see it with an audience in the room
that changes everything.
Four!
Three!
Two!
One!
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