Table of Contents
- Annie: Origins Cinematic
- Annie Universe Update
- The Art of Annie: Origins
- Behind the Scenes of Annie: Origins
- Annie Content, New and Old, Available Now!
Annie: Origins Cinematic
The full cinematic, Annie: Origins, is now available on Riot social media!"Discover the spark that set off the Dark Child’s fire."
Annie Universe Update
Along with the cinematic, Annie's Universe page was update with a new bio and tons of concept art!Bio: Annie, the Dark Child
"Boram Darkwill’s last years on the throne were a time of great uncertainty for Noxus, and many with an aptitude for magic left the capital for the relative peace of more distant provinces. Gregori the Gray and his wife, a witch by the name of Amoline, preferred to demonstrate their Noxian strength by taming the borderlands, rather than partaking in the political intrigue of the noble houses.
The young couple claimed a piece of land beyond the Ironspike Mountains to the north, finishing their small home just before winter and the arrival of their first child. During their journey, other colonists’ tales of the great shadow bears that once roamed the territory had captivated Amoline—now heavily pregnant, she passed the time sitting near the fireplace, creating a toy version of the protective creatures. Just as she finished sewing the last button eye on the stuffed bear, the quickening of labor overcame her. Gregori remarked later that his daughter was eager to play with her new toy, for there, on an ember-warmed hearth, Amoline brought Annie into the world.
When Annie was still a toddler, she and her father took ill. As night fell, Annie began to burn with fever, and soon she was so hot, she could no longer be held in her mother’s arms. Amoline grew desperate, deciding at last to fetch icy water from the nearby river. The next morning Gregori awoke, weak and groggy from his sickness. In the crib, a now-healthy Annie played with her stuffed bear, Tibbers, but Amoline was gone.
Naïvely, Annie believed her mother would one day return. Gregori would often find the girl sitting in her mother’s rocking chair near the hearth, hugging Tibbers and staring into a crackling fire, where he was sure there had been nothing but cold ashes. He chalked up these slips of the mind to the burden of parenting a child alone.
Years passed, bringing more colonists to the region. And in time, Gregori met Leanna, a woman seeking a new life outside the capital with her own young daughter, Daisy.
Annie was eager for a playmate, but spoiled by the indulgences of being an only child, so acclimation to her new stepfamily was difficult. Whenever Annie’s fiery temper erupted, it left Leanna uneasy, and quick to take her own daughter’s side. It fell to Gregori to keep an uneasy peace between the three.
Unused to the dangers of the untamed borderlands, Daisy’s playing ended in catastrophe for the family. Leanna, of course, blamed Annie for the loss of her daughter, focusing her rage and grief on her stepdaughter’s most prized possession: Tibbers. Annie was horrified as the last physical memory of her mother was threatened. The girl’s terror grew to an unbridled rage, releasing her latent and powerful pyromancy, and the stuffed bear was brought to life in a maelstrom of protective fire.
When the flames died down and the swirl of ash settled, Annie was left orphaned and alone.
Believing most city adults to be like her stepmother, Annie has kept to the wilder parts of her frontier homeland. On occasion, she will use her disarmingly adorable exterior to be taken in by some pioneer family long enough to be offered new clothes and a hot meal. However, fire and death awaits anyone foolish enough to try parting Annie from the stuffed bear at her side.
Kept safe by Tibbers, she wanders the dark forests of Noxus, oblivious to danger—and the dangers posed to others by her own unchecked power—hoping, one day, to find someone like her to play with."
Concept Art
A ton of new concept art from Annie: Origins is now on her Universe page:Annie: Origins Style Frames
Annie: Origins Concept Art
Annie: Origins Color Scripts
The Art of Annie: Origins
A dev blog is now up on the Nexus, on how the Annie: Origins cinematic was made!
"If you had walked to the farthest, darkest corner of Riot Games about a year ago, chances are you would have come across a small group of artists huddled together in dim lighting and deep discussion about how to make fire look like paint. The “Annie team” spent a lot of time like that, debating among themselves while wallpapering their part of the building with references and sketches—a madcap studio-within-a-studio hellbent on discovering the perfect method and medium for what was to be Annie’s origin story.
But the spark that started it all occurred long before there was ever a team.
IGNITION
It was 2012, and the first animated login screens appeared in the League client. These 2D graphics, carefully distorted to imitate motion, were an immediate hit with players and became a regular part of every new champion release. Seeing the massive popularity of “mographs” like Diana’s, one art director asked a deceptively simple question: What would one of these looping login screens look like as a long-form, animated story?
It was an intriguing idea, but there was a problem: The motion graphic artists at Riot used completely different technology and techniques than traditionally trained 2D animators. Creating a multi-minute animation would require an entirely new approach to making mographs, one that could extend far beyond the standard single looping shot.
It took some time to find a team wildly enthusiastic enough to attempt something no one at Riot (or maybe anywhere) knew how to do. It took more time to convince Riot—and themselves— that they could actually pull it off. But by the end, they didn’t just learn a new way to make mograph animations. They invented one.
ADDING MORE TO ANNIE
But first, they had to pick a champ.
“Originally, we were gonna do a Zed piece, and then we were thinking about a Miss Fortune one,” says director Anthony “ RiotPastaBomb” Possobon. “But other teams were already working on some ideas for those champs. We wanted to do something with a champion that no one else was really interested in so we wouldn’t overlap with other projects.”
When RiotPastaBomb and the motion graphics team began reviewing the League roster for a main character, Annie wasn’t perceived as a compelling protagonist. She’d made an appearance in a cinematic before, but to many Rioters she wasn’t a major character in the world of Runeterra. Her story was just too simple.
“She was an evil girl, and that’s it,” says RiotPastaBomb.
The team began thinking about how Annie might discover her powers—the initial sparks of a personality equal parts precocious and psychopathic. After a few drafts, they had an outline of Annie’s origin story that would deepen her character and hopefully wow players in a way her backstory never really had before.
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| Storyboards by Seung Eun Kim |
“We put together a storyboard, then turned it into an animatic with subtitles, using ‘Orb of Winter’ as the backing track to give a sense of the mood,” RiotPastaBomb recalls. “And we got the green light to keep going.”
from
http://www.surrenderat20.net/2018/02/annie-origins-cinematic-bio-update-art.html
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