ANNIE: Origins
I'd like to present to you a tragic cinematic story I directed and produced during my time at Riot Games. Its a story of a broken family, a young girl’s discovered power, and the love for a teddy bear.
After Annie’s mother’s death, she struggles to cope her father’s remarriage. The new mother is forced to deal with a child with powers beyond her understanding.
ANNIE: Origins | Behind the Scenes
The painterly style of animation required some hefty upfront RnD. The result leverages a conventional CG pipeline for the characters while keeping the majority of the environments and character effects, such as hair, in 2D. With simple lighting and modeling, we heavily relied on post-processing with Adobe Photoshop as a filtering render farm, traditional illustration art, and cel animation to achieve our final handcrafted look.
Scene animation cohesive became difficult with the use of the many asset mediums. Our solve, choose specific frames for each element to update in the scene and grouped element updates to simulate a living environment. As an example, all character animation, VFX that the character interacted with, and character hair animation would update at the same time. Whereas an environmental effect such as fire in the background can animate at its own pace.
The making of Article: League of Legends Nexus
More about Annie from League of Legends: League of Legends Universe
League of Legends the game: Website
Studio: Riot Games
"Monster" animatic - story development
Here's a little behind the scenes, at an early stage of the story development. This animatic sequence shows the point of no return for be "whole" again as a family. Annie gets blamed for her sisters death by her stepmother, revealing her true thoughts of Annie.
While I was directing and editing this together, it was important for me to double down in the emotion of this sequence by creating distance between Annie and her parents, casting shadows of the parents on the doors, framing Annie in her vulnerable state as she peers in while in hiding.
Seung Eun Kim did such an amazing job with the storyboards, capturing the essence of the moment and just flat out beautifully depicting the scenes and staging. It was also a joy working with Dan Negovan to score this, he was able to take my direction and amplify it ten fold. Lastly, what a stellar voice acting performance from Laura Bailey as the stepmother and Troy Baker as the father. Still remember sitting in the sound stage with goose bump watching them rock this scene. Very glad to work with these ridiculously talented folks early on.
Quentin Stipp, Ke Swaab, Lilit Hayrapetyan which really captured the dark and contrasted tone of the scene. They really did a killer job IMO. :)
Animation Previs
I found in production that we needed previs for every shot to save time in character animation. Above are a few examples of the process!
2D Hair Animation
The painterly hair proved to be one hell of a challenge. After exploring a few different avenues, I decided to develop a method that would enable our animators and stay true to the painterly style. All the hair in the cinematic is 2D. First our illustration artists create the 2D art asset, then we break it up, and then bring it into After Effects. There with a combination of custom animations scripts I developed (AFPDelay, AFPHairRig, MarkerFrameVariable) and perspective/shape distortion with Liquify, we get the result above. Typically the animation time takes a few hours.
CREDITS
Director: Anthony Possobon
Producer: Anthony Possobon
Story by: Aaron Ehasz, Anthony Possobon
Storyboard Artist: Seung Eun Kim
Score by: Dan Negovan
Video Editor: Anthony Possobon
Art Director: Lilit Hayrapetyan
Design Lead: Ke Swaab
Tech Lead: José Martín
Line Producer: Jonathan Lo
Screenplay writing: Graham McNeill, Anthony Possobon
Script collaborators: Aaron Ehasz, Devon Giehl
LOOK DEVELOPMENT
Character Concept: Section Studios, Seung Eun Kim
Design: Ke Swaab, Lilit Hayrapetyan, Yi-Jen Jiu
Paint Animation Look Dev: José Martín
Color Script: Ke Swaab, Quentin Stipp, Lilit Hayrapetyan
TECH
Team Pipeline Tools: José Martín
Post-Processing Paint Tool: José Martín
Paint Rendering Pipeline: José Martín
2D Hair tool: Anthony Possobon
ENVIRONMENT
Modeling: Lilit Hayrapetyan
Lighting: Lilit Hayrapetyan
3D Layout: Lilit Hayrapetyan, Andru Phoenix
2D Layout: Evan Huang, Ilya Abulkhanov
Illustration: Yi-Jen Jiu, Quentin Stipp, Victoria Orolfo, Edward Georgian, Ke Swaab
CHARACTER
Modeling: Triada Studios
Texture: Ke Swaab
Rigging: Triada Studios, José Martín
Layout: Lilit Hayrapetyan, Craig Christian
Animation Previs: Craig Christian, Joon Song
Animation: Joon Song, Nayoun Kim, Triada Studios
Cloth Simulation: Triada Studios
2D CFX: Evan Huang, Ilya Abulkhanov
Lighting: Kim Zhu, Zhenya Hovhannisyan, José Martín, Lilit Hayrapetyan
3D Projection: Vivian Su, Zhenya Hovhannisyan, José Martín
2D Hair Animation: Evan Huang, Ilya Abulkhanov, Anthony Possobon
Illustration: Quentin Stipp, Yi-Jen Jiu, Victoria Orolfo, Ke Swaab
Cel Animation: Quentin Stipp, Yi-Jen Jiu, Ke Swaab
VISUAL EFFECTS
3D VFX: Vivian Su, José Martín
2D VFX: Evan Huang, Ilya Abulkhanov, Anthony Possobon
Cel Animation: Yi-Jen Jiu, Quentin Stipp, Ke Swaab, Evan Huang, Lilit Hayrapetyan, José Martín
POST
Compositing: Evan Huang, Ilya Abulkhanov, José Martín, Zhenya Hovhannisyan, Kim Zhu, Marie Denoga, Anthony Possobon
Color Correction: Company 3
AUDIO
Sound Designer: Brad Beaumont
Sound Mix: Sean Balas
VOICE ACTING
Stepmother: Laura Bailey
Father: Troy Baker
Daisy: Megan Richie
Annie: Emma Shannon
