We go all in on the opening ceremony because of the respect
we have for the players who are about to play.
They deserve the world's greatest opening act
and we're always trying to exceed expectations with that.
This is the year Arcane is revealed to players around
the world, sharing a much deeper realization and
expression the world of Runeterra.
We had to find a way to draw inspiration from Arcane and
tell the main heartbeat of the show without giving away
anything that might be considered a spoiler.
From the get go
we had planned on a kind of half and half hybrid ceremony,
creating this immersive, stunning music videos, but then
also to have live show elements.
We wanted to create something that was less in a virtual
space and more in a physically based space.
We wanted to build Piltover and Zaun on stage.
We were really excited by the idea of being able to bring
magic elements into the real world.
This is going to be the biggest live event Riot's ever done.
That was the initial plan before everything changed.
It's no wonder that Fortiche spent the last three or four years
working on Arcane, it's very well done.
The art for it is beautiful.
That's exciting for us.
On the other hand, we have to make sure that what we do is
able to live up to that as well.
Arcane is going to invite players around the world to
better understand the characters of League of Legends
so we felt the creative opportunity was to
bring the worlds of League of Legends to life in the context
of the Opening Ceremony.
For two or three months,
we had been planning the Opening Ceremony as a stage show.
The show was completely planned around this massive set that's
going to be built inside the stadium, a stadium that's
bigger than the Bird's Nest.
So scale was going to be a big component.
This was going to be the biggest venue that we've ever
played in, and we were putting in a lot of detail and energy
to making sure that we could do something very magical in front
of this enormous crowd.
We were to do three different music video segments that would
then play a part in the live show appearing on the monitors
inner playing with the Live event.
And I remember looking over their decks and I was like,
"This is very scaled."
The challenging thing was working with the live show and
what their needs were for their story beats.
We have to get from A to B, but what's the coolest
way to get there?
It was ambitious,
it was enormous,
it had automation,
it had lots of things,
all designed down to the nut and bolt.
We're 10 months into planning.
We are thousands of people hours into creative.
We've now been in technical and physical production for
about seven weeks.
We're putting gear on boats.
We're putting gear on planes.
Were signing contracts.
We're in a place to really start to bring this show to life.
It's extremely difficult to get everything aligned while we're
in a global pandemic.
About a month before Worlds started, we just started
to realize we weren't able to pull off Worlds at the scale
we knew we needed to pull it off.
Without certain resources and without certain individuals,
it becomes impossible under those constraints to achieve
what we set out to do.
Nick, I think shielded us from everything until he was certain.
On August 16th, it became clear that the Opening Ceremony was
not going to be possible to deliver in Mainland China.
On August 19th,
I knew with certainty that Worlds was going to be
leaving Mainland China.
The Opening Ceremony, as we understand it, doesn't make
sense outside of one of the biggest stadiums in the world,
which meant we now had two different
emergency searches to launch.
It's super hard to make that decision, but the most
important thing always has to be the competitive integrity
of the competition.
Our ability to deliver a Worlds that is worthy of our pros
and our fans around the world.
And so everything comes to a complete standstill.
Hitting the brakes like that is jarring to say the least.
It was an entire reframing of thinking, what could this
even be anymore?
So we all just like go cram into a room and say we're not
coming out until we know what this is going to be.
We went through every version of this show that we could.
I think in the back of our minds, all of us knew like
this just has to become a full cinematic, full VFX,
full animation.
And I think we're on our first day of actually live shooting.
They pulled me aside and they were like, "Look, we're no
longer doing the live show.
We want to go even crazier with it."
We made the choice to keep the music videos as a
static element of the creative and then started writing
a new narrative.
And that's when concept around what we've begun calling
the Show Open began.
As we made this shift to cinematic, we penciled
Reykjavik Iceland as where the World Championship was going to move to.
In parallel we'd identified the United Kingdom
as the right place to move
the Opening Ceremony to.
While we were confident that we had
great footage from the music videos we'd shot in Los Angeles,
the show was still missing this massive sense of
spectacle and splendor.
It became increasingly clear that this cinematic moment
should be this massive marketplace in Zaun,
where everyone can feel the richness of the world.
This thing had so many moving parts from the music video
production teams here in L.A., the performance
stage in Iceland.
The whole building needed to go into that.
The set build in Birmingham, which was where the Zaun set was built.
You know this 30 foot high walls that we've built,
you're wrapped 360 in Zaun.
It is very rare to be able to play in
a playground like the set that they created in Birmingham.
There's all the many animation and VFX teams we had to bring on.
We needed to aggressively and massively scale our
entire team.
We started up an effects department,
environment department, lighting departments,
character animation.
All told, over 1300 people were required.
In a normal world you would have seven or eight
months to produce this thing.
We had less than two.
The only way to pull off a project of this scope
in a timeline
this short is to have highly functioning partners
who can just do what they do so well.
This entire 13 and a half minute piece is a Jenga tower.
You know, if one moment of it doesn't land, the rest of
it's at risk.
It was so important to have people already looking to the
post and VFX on set to make sure we were preparing ourselves and
setting ourselves up for success.
So in wrapping up in Birmingham, what will happen
across the next two and a half weeks is an extraordinarily
aggressive post-production schedule.
We have to move that process as fast as it can physically go.
The greatest constraint on this entire project is the ability
to do animation, set extension and visual effects at
effectively feature film levels of quality in 10 percent of
the time frame.
So we needed to bring all of the weird elements
together 3D, 2D, live action, set build, set extensions
in 3D.
But also we want it to look like the Arcane series.
So like it's all these departments moving forward
in parallel, we're trying to make them all feel cohesive
and similar, which is very difficult when nobody has
anything finished along the way.
We had to do a lot of things in tandem where usually we would
wait for one step to resolve before we
moved on to the next step.
By the nature of the sort of production timeline that
we had, we knew that we were not going to be uploading the
show to probably a few hours before
it went to air.
Everything is down to the wire and we are going to be using
every second until that final delivery to get things as
polished as they need to be.
A week out from the show, none of us are sleeping well.
This is the five day period where everything
has to converge.
We still didn't have much finalized because everything
was still in flight.
I think the first sequence that we had done was between
Playground and Enemy when we see Jinx and Vi in the arcade.
And that was the Wednesday before it aired on Saturday.
For as much time and attention went into bringing Zaun and Piltover
to over to life, the thing that we could never lose sight of is
how important the reveal of the Summoner's Cup and the players is
to the overall moment.
So the way we revealed the trophy this year, we were
excited by because this intricately designed Hextech Sphere
served a narrative purpose
inside the story we were telling, but also became
the thing that unveiled the trophy.
It re-centers us back in the purpose of the moment, which is
the World Finals.
The night before the show is sort of this twilight
of stress, you're close enough to delivery that you can't
change the outcome, but because you haven't actually made it
across the finish line yet, there's this incredible
pressure that you might not.
At this point, we're going to do whatever it takes to make
sure this thing goes off without a hitch.
We knew we weren't going to have the Show Open completely
delivered until about two hours before broadcast.
Ultimately, we're going to come down to the mercy of, "How fast
can a file be downloaded?"
Friday evening, I was waiting for my last deliverable.
Three of the deliverables had come through via Dropbox,
but the two largest ones hadn't yet.
By this time, we absolutely have to be uploading
the files, otherwise it's not going to make it.
What if the fiber goes down?
What if the power goes out?
Someone was running over to the colorist in Burbank to get
everything on a drive, placed the final shot in.
Upload it.
Press play.
I think 4 or 5 AM my time
we're like, "Okay, everything's out of our hands at this point."
We took our hands off the wheel and popped open a
bottle of champagne.
After that moment where we hit play, kind of a blur.
It's the first time everyone can take a breath.
I just remember this great sense of accomplishment and joy
and be able to see it all together with the people that
help you build the thing.
After that, it was like, "What do we do now?"
The thing that I think will separate this year is the level
of passion that everyone brought to the project.
And I think that that shines through in the
finished product.
Just being able to work and occupy in the same space as
so many creative people, a dedicated group of fans and
players all together in this great community, it feels
really like an honor to be part of something like this.
We affect people emotionally or when we impact
people with what we do,
that's what I'm most proud of.
I think with every opening ceremony or show open, we push
the boundaries a little bit more in different directions.
So who knows what we'll do next?