Misfits League of Legends

Misfits approached us with an idea of creating a 2D animated sequence for their roster announcement video. The premise was for Deficio, who put the Misfits 2022 roster together, to re-live an iconic battle between Rogue & Misfits as a nightmare. The most challenging aspect of this project was to present the Summoner’s Rift & LoL champions without using the actual in-game IP.

 

Fiddlesticks eliminating Champions.

 

The phases for our League Nightmare sequence were straight-forward: pre-production, production & post-production. The initial phase included writing a script and compiling a mood board to understand the environment aesthetics. Next up was figuring out a visual style for the characters and understanding what the best solution for the animation style was.

 

Mood board which we created that helped us define the visual aesthetics style.

 

We worked based off of an original voiceover of the play-by-play narrative of the casters in order to understand the sequence duration. After creating a storyboard, we put together an animatic to understand the duration & pacing of each individual scene. We worked on the concept art for the characters and the mood for the environment. Instead of using a 1:1 copy of the in-game champions, we used silhouettes instead.

 

The initial animatic which we created based on the storyboard which served as a skeleton for the final video.

 

When we started compiling the storyboard, we wanted to make sure to truly capture Deficio’s horrified state. We wanted this 2D sequence to look very dark and grim in addition to showing the fear in Deficio’s eyes and face. During our creative sessions with the Misfits crew, we came up with a scene where one of the crows of Fiddlesticks’ ultimate could potentially poop on Deficio as a little playful element no one would expect.

 

Arcane definitely had a huge impact on the aesthetics of the characters.

 

The production phase featured two different areas of work – character concept art & environment creation. After we defined the style and concepts, we illustrated the environment first, then added the characters and finished by animating every scene. The project included concept art for 3 characters and environments for 15 scenes in total, which were all animated in the end.

 

Deficio’s character evolution.

 

Evolution of one of the background scenes.

 

During the last phase of the project, all the frames were put together and animated based on the initial animatic. With the pre-defined animation style & pacing, we brought these amazing scenes to life. Frame-by-frame 2D animation for the beams slaying champions, wild fire dancing in the wind and one crow’s little poop added an little extra bit of humor on top of this project.

 

Work in progress of one of the scenes and its layers which could be separately animated.

 

The iconic scene of the battle between Rogue & Misfits was re-lived by Deficio and Misfits’ fans. The whole video was received with wide acclaim. With the new roster of Misfits set to create some new memories for the fans, we can safely say that Fiddlesticks and one of his crows will never be forgotten. At least not by Deficio.

 

Before & After of the Misfits Conspiracy video.