It's all in the Details

So my usual posts have been about how "we can do this or that", or at least that the animations that we see professionally done are a ton of work, but we can do. I want to take a step back from that for a second to talk about this video I found, because it approaches it's style of animation very well and does a lot of cool stuff. So I'm not going to say that I could make something like this, because it is really, really incredible work, but I want to pull out some cool things it does and talk about them. This is a video for League of Legends, about it's "Championship Series", and follows several top players at the game as they "transform" into the champions they play in the game. So you end up with the animations of a bunch of people who are half video game characters, acting as those characters. The creators made a conscious decision to still have a majority of the character model as the person, so we can still identify who they are. On top of this, in the first part they have the people in front of banners representing their team name, thus further having the audience play the game of "who is that?". The one thing I really liked about this video is all the extra little details they add in to make the animations seem more real. The "golem hand" has a little smoke come out of it for example, and when the hand hits a rock that rock breaks apart just a little bit. The green ooze that comes off one of them just has a little bit of particles going on to make it look better, and sparks and smoke effects are common on all of the animations used. I love these little touches because it is really these things that add production value to this type of piece. The art style is obviously really striking, but to make an animation believable you need to really be detailed oriented, not just thinking about the super big picture. Because obviously the animation and story as a whole are strong here but in my opinions the details count dramaticly more then we give them credit for

Cutout style animation

This is an interesting animation that I found, put out by Riot Games, creators of the video game "League of Legends". The content isn't all that important, but when I saw it, the animation style really caught my eye. It starts out with the "animation of words" style graphics that Arturo showed in class. Where it gets interesting is when it gets into the animation of gameplay sequences. The point of these animations is to represent gameplay without actually showing recorded gameplay. It is a pseudo-cutout style, and involves a lot of 2d graphics moving around in a somewhat 3d space. The cutout characters move around and do the actions they normally do within the game, but in the cutout style that the video uses. The whole time, the video follows the narrator using the "stream of consciousness" sort of style that this type of video tends to use. It seems to me that one of the harder things about making this video would be making the elements recognizable to players while still making each asset unique. Each action that these "faces with weapons"take is one that is based on the game, and since the video is made for players, needs to be recognizable to them. However, using this 2d cutout style would naturally make this difficult to pull off. Overall, its a very cool animation that accomplishes its intention well.