RIOT GAMES
RIOT GAMES
ROLESCLIENT: Riot Games
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Mack Garrison
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Mack Garrison
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Cory Livengood
DESIGN: Meg Snyder, Louis Wesoloswky, Jake Page
ANIMATION: Jay Brown, Mikey Zoppo, Cory Livengood, Zac Miller, Mack Garrison, Erich Reimers, Zak Tietjen
MUSIC: “Silver Scrapes” by Danny McCarthy. Collegiate version courtesy of Riot Games
DETAILSThe League of Legends College Championships represent the best of the best when it comes to the student-led network of LoL players on university campuses across the U.S. and Canada. So when Riot Games asked if we could make an epic event opener as well as a loading screen for the 2018 Championships in three weeks we grabbed our best champions (whoops! we mean animators) and hit the ground running!
DISCOVERY & IDEATIONDeveloping the overarching aesthetic for such a well known game was both challenging and inspiring as we thought about different ways to bring the video to life. Riot had a general idea about an infinite zoom-style animation but was pretty open to the overarching aesthetic. We worked with their team to build a mood board (see below) that reflected a general direction for our team but they were very open for our own explorations. The League Of Legends College Championship exists for one simple reason: To crown the best college League Of Legends team in North America. The visuals had to feel epic, energetic, exciting, uplifting, inspiring, and driving and we needed to accent all the content with an equally powerful anthem sound track. In addition to the mood board below is the the early creative brief we created to get our team rolling
Epic
Energetic
Driving
Uplifting
Inspirational
Creative
STYLE FRAMESLike any collegiate championship, there is a lot of pride with each of the schools involved so we wanted to develop a look that merged iconography from the univiersities with easter-eggs and elements from the game. The Riot team provided dash studio deep dives into each team, their favorite champions, and details that would make it a more authentic experience for each university. Because of the aggressive timeline, we needed to limit feedback which is why we pitched two directions: a more artistic and cel-animated approach juxtaposed with a more graphic treatment. This duality ensured we could move forward after the initial review.
STORYBOARDSFollowing the initial style frame exploration, our teams ultimately decided that the clean, graphic approach made the most sense given the shortened timeline but that we should selectively bring in some of the more artistic elements as accents to the piece. With the mixed vector and illustrated approach solidified our next step was building out the storyboards to highlight the campus elements and easter eggs we wanted to include.
Here are the full names, locations, and order of the competing schools illustrated as storyboards below in addition to some collegiate iconography we experimented with.
Maryville University - "Maryville" - St.Louis, MO
University of California, Irvine - "UC Irvine" - Irvine, CA
University Western Ontario - "Western" - London, Ontario
University of Texas, Dallas - "UT Dallas" - Richardson, TX
Columbia College, "Columbia College" - Columbia, MO
University of Maryland, College Park - "Maryland" - College Park, MD
Ottawa University - "Ottawa" - Ottawa, Ontario
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign - "Illinois" - Champaign County, IL
KeyframesWith approval on the boards we were off to the races with design and animation. Typically we would have a more formal review in our process before jumping into animation but with game day rapidly approaching our plan was simple: designers would finish frames for internal approval (visualized below), quick pass to Riot for their okay, and then immediately off to our animation team to bring in to life. This is where community matters and why relationships are so important in the creative process. Because our designers and illustrators knew the animation team so well, assets were broken down and tailored to needs of each animator so they could hit the ground running. The end result is a phenomenal team effort to bring an amazing opening video to life.
The Big Day
It was ultimately the UC Irvine Anteaters that that prevailed as Champions although we felt an equal sense of pride wrapping up this series. Here’s a shot of Riot’s headquarters in L.A. showing off the opening video.
Log-in Screen
In addition to the hype-video we also created a log-in screen for League of Legends to accompany the loop. Knowing over 100 million players had eyes on this log-in screen might be the biggest flex in the history of our studio!
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