Annie's always been a character in our mind
that could be expressed beyond the game constructs.
There's something interesting here because it is a really crazy story
about how she becomes who she is.
She loses everything, but then gains her own
self-confidence in what she's capable of doing.
We've never had an opportunity to go deep
into who Annie really is before,
why she's such a troubled, pained, and tragic character.
Annie as a character has this dark side of her.
She is a little evil.
Very little and innocent girl.
And so a lot of people underestimate her.
She really stands out with her character,
with her look and Tibbers of course.
She is this tragic character with these very dark powers.
She'll burn you and laugh while doing so.
Anthony had a really cool idea on her origin story,
how she became who she is,
to help people understand the soul of Annie.
If we told that story for the Annie that
we have in game right now,
just evil kid that has fire,
I think that makes Annie's story flat.
We wanted to expand her world.
A lot of her power comes from her emotion and
sort of depth of pain and anguish.
Tibbers is central to that power.
Tibbers was a gift from her mom,
kind of the last tangible memory and connection
she has to her real mom.
We want to portray this child side of Annie
and that's why we settled on this painterly and fairy tale kind of style.
It looks like a painting coming into life.
How much can we make Annie's story feel like a child's fairy tale
being told back to you in a medium that's appropriate for that?
We've never done anything like this before.
There was a lot of R&D that required actually a team
to spend quite a bit of time to figure out the look and feel.
We tested out motion capture initially
and then from there we started with 2D,
but it just didn't really work well for our project.
Why don't we just paint every single frame?
Realistically if you were to paint 24 frames a second,
you'd need like an army of people
to be able to do something like that.
We're talking in thousands upon thousands of hand-painted frames.
The problem is how do you build a character that looks painterly
but is still able to give you a performance that is realistic?
We've seen full 3D CG content before
and we wanted something that just looked unique
and something that we could call our own
and live up to an Annie story.
I pushed to use realistic 3D
and then making it look painterly.
I want to be sure that the end result
is looking more hand-crafted.
We start from our foundation
which is producing the actual 3D animation that you'll see
that feels flat but gives us the emotion.
So we project this flat image onto the 3D model itself.
Now that one 3D character
has this texture on it that feels painterly.
And then finishing it off
with the painterly cel animation on top to give it life.
Alright, so we'll start here.
They should be forty percent smaller.
Thinking the tree on the right
is too low.
Aaah.
Oooh.
The perspective that everyone has of Annie
is her in game,
so let's bring it out.
Let's see how much of that personality
we can get out of it
to incorporate what we know of her,
including her abilities.
So for instance, burning her sister,
that's her Q.
Setting fire to her room,
you know, that's her shield.
So I'm hoping that when you do use your R
or when you've actually created Tibbers,
that it sparks that memory of like, "Oh yeah, yikes!"
If you want the character inside people's heart,
you have to build a backstory
to let people be related to them.
You're going to feel connected to her
in a different way.
And I like her more.
Now she's someone real.
She's not pixels on the screen.
I hope that players when they watch this
it elicits a connection
an emotion to make you feel for her.