How the animation of "Ruination" works || animation breakdown

hello braves and warriors my name is tb skyne and well i guess i can't accuse riot of not feeding me content because hey second animated short to take a look at and probably i should also do a discussion video talking a little bit about lore theories for where the heck riot is even going with all of this nonsense but uh yeah last time we took a look at the happy-go-lucky yordle adventures in bilgewater where everyone had fun and everything was cute and nobody got hurt but today we're looking at ruination a short where nobody has any fun everything goes terribly bad and a lot of people get really badly hurt so nekrit has a full breakdown of like all of the lore stuff that goes into this particular short and all of the stuff that it's teasing so if you want to know about the redeemed story and the many little teasers that riot has planted um leading up to this particular short i recommend his video for our purposes we're going to be talking about the filmmaking and the animation primarily and it's worth starting with the point of this cinematic from a storytelling perspective the point of it is well you're looking at it right now it's introducing the ruined king as a major villain in an upcoming storyline that's probably going to like be the main driver of a lot of what's going to be happening in the story for season 11 at least that's what riot is teasing given that the ruined king's crown is quite literally the icon for this season the point of this short is to establish him as a villain to show us what it is that he wants what he's willing to do in order to get it and what the consequences might be if he gets what he wants which is what's about to happen right now we get the full calling forth of a ruination all across runeterra from the immortal bastion to ionia to demacia basically like major regions all being threatened by this rising scourge of undeath uh so this is like if the ruined king wins this is what's gonna happen and then we get the introduction to the heroes that will stand against the coming tide of darkness specifically poppy who looks [ __ ] amazing in this thing darius samira karma and well notably absent are the people of bilgewater i would they it would have been you would might imagine that you'd get to see the heroes of the ruined king game uh show up here as well but that seems to be kept a little bit separate here because we had vayne and poppy uh representing demacia but nothing from bilgewater nothing from shirima or ishtal or targon so make of that what you will maybe that could just be a thing for time where they didn't want to go to every single goddamn region we also get an introduction to the ruined king's perhaps most terrifying power certainly the one that forms the basis of um uh his gameplay pattern which is his ability to mind control others which is something that almost works on karma and certainly works on darius and depending on just how lore canon the ruined skins that we're getting are might also work on draven and shyvana who really knows it's it's tough to say how canon that's ever going to really be but it's certainly interesting at the very least and that's the point of this short is like here's the rune king here's what he can do here's what happens if he wins now let's go and fight against him contained within that we also get some storytelling for lucian and senna specifically for example we get this moment right here where lucian demonstrates pretty clearly when it comes to a choice between attacking the villain who is going to end the world and saving his wife lucian chooses his wife every single time that is his weakness as a character that's been an ongoing storyline for him is that he's willing to sacrifice literally anything that it might take in order to keep senna safe which is something that he and her are working on emotionally as a couple because senna on the other hand is a lot more concerned with actually saving the world you know so let's actually have a look at the animation in this thing and uh well using the yordle short as a point of comparison there is a very different visual style on display here and actually i forgot to look up who the animation studio is for that this one so hey futurescan could you just like check it out and put on text in the screen and maybe also show us some of the other work that that animation studio has done because this is some damn high quality work but from a visual storytelling perspective this is different in a number of interesting ways for example the tales of runeterra shorts usually rely on painted backgrounds that is to say they'll have a digital artist paint digital backgrounds and then characters will be acting like they'll insert 3d characters into 2d images essentially and have the 2d images function as a background this is a very different thing because these backgrounds are all of them as far as i can tell at least like they could be very well disguised matte paintings but as far as i can tell all of these backgrounds are fully 3d rendered um see if i can find a shot of like the immortal bat yeah here for example you can really see that this is a 3d environment that the characters are placed within rather than the 2d environments um of the tales of rune terror shorts and that creates a much higher burden of labor like it takes a lot more work and time just to render all these environments to construct them and to put them through the rendering process on the computer like it's much more labor-intensive and therefore it's a lot more just expensive in terms of the amount of budget that you'll need in order to create something like this not to suggest that doing it the way the tales of runeterra shorts does is like cheap or easy cause it's not animation never is but certainly this is a more high budget production from that perspective and it gives us a little bit of a sense of how riot wants us to understand these shorts because the tales from runeterra shorts tales of rune terror shorts they are always rather low stakes like they're not like these aren't grand world spanning conflicts it's like heimerdinger and his apprentice have a thing stolen by jinx and then we have wacky hijinks as they try to get them back or it's twisted fate and graves getting into a humorous altercation with misfortune like there's never really massive stakes here it's just like people hanging out mostly doing sort of saturday morning cartoon adventures this right here on the other hand be like part of the point of spending more money part of the point of having the higher production values of making everything look more fully realized is to impart to the viewer the sense that okay shit's going down right here like the stuff is getting serious this is all getting very real so let's actually look at the character animation at play here because again using the tales of runeterra short as a point of comparison this is much more grounded and i wouldn't say realistic necessarily because there's a lot of stuff about this that is not realistic at all but it's much more grounded animation it's much more subtle and something you'll notice it's also a lot slower if you look at the movements and behaviors of the characters in the tales of rune terror shorts not just like the yordles but just in general the characters in those shorts they tend to have a little bit more of that cartoon timing to their movements and behaviors comparatively these characters move with weight there is weight to every motion and action that they take and that weight is key to the groundedness of the situation but it's also key to just the mood of the character acting that's being done here let's take a look for example uh these lovely fellas here is there there's these charming gentlemen coming along here take a look at how this guy runs this guy up front like he's like a undead wisp of something created from the black mist i mean if it has a physical body like i i must be surprised but look at how it has to move as it stands up you can see how it's like oh you can see how its legs are being used to push its body weight up and it's kind of loping forward and it's running with this sort of hunched over gate like it's almost sort of struggling to carry its own torso aloft until it finally gets like within striking distance so there's so much weight to how these characters are moving they feel like if if like if you felt them step on you which some people in the comments are gonna make weirdly sexual but like if this thing actually like like trod on you it would feel like you had like a full body on top of you in a way that it just doesn't with more cartoony aesthetics um and that's a very subtle little thing um that animators can do when it comes to selling you like the mood and like the literal gravitas of a situation is just make the characters move with more weight we can see it in another subtle little gesture a little bit earlier on if i can find the moment when lucian takes the gun from senna so pay attention to how lucian's hand is moving here you see that you see that settling look especially here in the thumb as it comes down like the way it settles and you can see how the leather of his gloves deform like as the weight of his hands settles down on his wife's and you can also see that the weight of his hand is like gently pushing her hand downwards with the force of what he's doing um and the same thing comes when he actually takes the gun like you can see when he's lifting his hand there's this slow pull and again you can see the tension returning to the folds of his fingers and he grabs the gun and senna let's go and as she lets go look what happens to the gun it gets pulled downwards by its own gravity before lucian like gets hold and resists it again so everything not just the characters but everything in the scene is moving with that sense of gravity that sense of weight which gives it the weight of reality which of course like this is not a realistic human person really but because you have this weight of movement you get a sense of realism from them like you come away with a feeling of realism and that's also aided by the way that they use lighting and texture look at the soft velvet texture of senna's hood here like that just looks like oh it looks like it'd be nice and smooth and like just sort of feel lovely and soft and warm against the skin right look at the texture of her hair like god damn cena's hair looks amazing in this thing look at this the like the woolly curly texture of that hair it's gorgeous and again that sense of reality look at the lighting in the rings uh that she's got braided in her into her hair like the bright orange highlight over here like the colder edge light over the other side the brass color of uh of most of it sort of highlighted with these golden and the little scuffs and scraps and marks the little imperfections all of this like having that realistic aesthetic even if like this is not like necessarily a realistic human having that realistic aesthetic again sells the mood of the whole piece which is that oh the stakes are real these real people who can die when someone gets hurt in this world it's not like when tristana or teemo or graves gets hurt in the yordle short where it's just like oh that's cartoon they yeah they just get hit on the head they're fine like there's no permanent trauma or anything when a person gets hit in this aesthetic it's like oh jesus christ oh god they're ribs like that's the feeling that you're supposed to get from it and this is not like advanced super animation signs or anything this is just the basics of how you use an aesthetic to communicate like the feeling of the action to communicate the stakes and the importance of what happens and speaking of very basic filmmaking here's a good way to show that these two characters are up against something that's much bigger than them pen the camera outlaw zoom the camera out really really far so that they're any little tiny things like just barely present on the screen right here and then show that the thing they're up against this huge tidal wave coming in like just dominating a whole side of the screen that's a good way again to show what are the stakes of what's going on here well it's a two tiny little insignificant people standing against a force that is comparable to like a natural disaster essentially again all about selling the stakes and i do like this transition that we go from the camera sort of being steady staying outside of the mist watching the two of them walk in then we get this wisp daring across the screen and a smoke screen that then transitions us into all of a sudden the camera rather than being static like so the camera goes from like holding still which is what it does pretty much yeah from here camera really doesn't move like it's it's very gently circling like it's a drone shot or something and then here the camera is like very lightly tracking center and loosening but it stays still then once the smoke screen comes in all of a sudden we have this sort of almost more handheld effect as the camera tracks towards the oncoming ghouls to give us a sense of the rapidness of their approach and the threat that they pose and then by contrast our two characters here you see they have this this little moment of communication we're like like lucian looks at senna senna twists her head around and then lucian knows what to do so she pulls away um the black mist that veils them that protects them because she has a limited amount of control over the black mist and lucian does what lucian does best which is blast undead creatures into absolute smithereens then again after we see the two of them spring into action and be competent at something little reminder that no yes there's still there's still tiny little insignificant humans battling against forces that are much bigger than them doing a competent job at it you can see how senna is essentially parting the waters of the mist you can see how she's lighting the way as lucian says in the voice over um but it's still like okay but they they have some resistance to it but they're still overwhelmed and i do like the shot of we cut to the shot the camera is tracking senna because she's the important one in this scene and lucian is just sort of in the background just just basically simping for senna as hard as viego uh sims for assault bit like just protecting his queen uh making sure that her approach to the actual villain of the piece is unobstructed which is what we get here here we have the big bad villain but again notice that he's tiny little bitty in the screen like right now he's he's visually small in the screen but take a look at the way that this image is posed he's completely in the center of all of this right like the composition centers him all of the mist like the direction of the mist flows from him forward uh sort of like a wind at his back and that combines with the fact that he's sitting casually on a thing that looks vaguely like a throne in the center it gives you this sense of okay he's at the center of all of this he's the eye of the storm he's the source of this he's the person who's controlling this and now finally we get our first shot of the ruined king notice the angle from which we are seeing him where is the horizon line from the perspective of the camera it's somewhere well i mean dinka k will appreciate this it's somewhere level with his crotch pretty much like our eye line is like somewhere down around here and we are looking up at him from below and he's quite literally looking down at us from above and that again in film language is like the most basic possible and also one of the most effective ways that you can establish that this character has power in this scene that he's dominant that he has control and that we are subject to that power and control that we are vulnerable to him compare and contrast with if you had the camera angle like way from above as though we are a giant peeking down at him that's a very different feel it's a very different emotion in the scene let's talk about the smoke tech by the way so smoke tech like this has been around in the animation industry for a good long while to the best of my knowledge it's a it's partly a procedurally generated physics engine um that handles making the smoke like looks so liquid and looks so flowing and have these very sort of beautiful realistic billowings and behaviors that's like partly um procedurally generated but animators and vfx artists and the director still do a lot of work in terms of making sure that like this thing just doesn't flow randomly that it just doesn't flow away all over the scene remember how i talked about how the way that the smoke is flowing like the way that the black mist is flowing from viego here in the center creating sort of this this path this these visual lines that lead directly to him that's the work of the directors and animators like making sure that these like wisps of of magic that flow out that all the movement of the scene that all this smoke movement is doing what they want it to in order to communicate what the scene is doing that stuff doesn't happen by accident you don't just tell the computer to make the smoke go and then just let it flow there is customization here um and that's the thing i think sometimes people get wrong when it comes to stuff like motion capture and like procedurally generated animation there's this folk myth that oh well you just tell the computer to do the thing and you don't need like it's not people who do it's just the computer graphics technology is generating the thing automatically and it really isn't like this there's still a hell of a lot of creative input that comes in from the animators from the director from the vfx artist from the whole team like it's a it's a collaborative effort it's a team effort to make something like this um to make the scene look correct and if they hadn't been doing that if they had just like grabbed a procedural generation smoke physics engine and said okay just this smoke comes from here and it falls down then this scene would just be a mess of just smoke absolutely everywhere we wouldn't have this clear line of sight on viego himself sitting in this outcrop that rises above the smoke clouds there's always work there's always creative choices going into showing you everything you see on screen like and that's why something i repeat often in these animation breakdowns is that everything you see on screen every movement every twitch every behavior every little crinkle in the clothes every bit of lighting everything that happens here is a choice that someone had to think about and then make in order to make this thing look the way it does here's a good example take a look at the lighting on senna in this scene we have this green edge lighting coming from the side as though she's being lit up by one of the wisps um that fly around we have these shadows coming down on the left side of the face that's a choice that someone makes someone makes decisions about okay where are the light sources in this scene how are we going to render them on the character because again oftentimes it's not as simple as just saying let's tell the computer to make each one of these wisps a light source and then just have them move and then just let the light do whatever the hell it wants because that again can lead to complete visual chaos that can lead to pandemonium something that doesn't look good and that wouldn't really give senna this mood that she has here which is one of confronting a powerful enemy with courage you do not belong here like she's she's she's literally not taking any of his [ __ ] she's standing firm against him and in order to communicate that feeling you need a certain amount of visual stability on the character so that they don't look like they're losing control of the situation right now senna is in control of the situation she's not well she's probably scared of him um because she's a sensible person but she's like she is acting with courage so we get a steadiness in the lighting of the character even though the scene is chaotic the lighting on senna is pretty steady pretty consistent um and so she looks like this bastion of courage like this bastion of strength standing against like the absolute chaos that's happening behind her similarly look at viego here now senna in the shot before she's fully lit like there's some shadows going on on her but she's fully lit we can see all the details of a character we can see the breastplate we can see the cloak we can see her colors we can see everything then we cut to the ruined king and even though they're pretty much in the same environment like there's not more than 100 feet between them diego's lighting conditions are very very different in fact let me zoom in on him a little bit once again right to the crotch because that that where the eye line is take a look at how he's lit by comparison he's sort of like first of all his color scheme is already kind of drab he's very pale he's got like a black overcoat and like black leggings and black boots because he's a emo boy um so he's already kind of sort of black and white in that sense but he's also like just devoid of color mostly in general and even though he has light sources on him he has this bright light coming from his chest he has the light coming from his crown the light coming from his ring his face is mostly in shadow like we barely get to see like what he even looks like at this point he's like mostly in shadow um his body is mostly in shadow and the most of the the information we get about the shape of him comes from these very bright green edge lights that exist all over his character model which again this is someone making a conscious decision about how to present this character how to make him look menacing in this moment by giving him these glowing eyes against a mostly shadowed face against a mostly darkened body and then once he rises like once he sort of slips out of this position here his face is very much in darkness slowly he begins to light up a little bit like slowly he begins to reveal himself slowly you begin to see what it is he actually looks like but even now like it's hard to make out his actual facial features right like he has a nose and mouth and his eyes there but like exactly what his face looks like it's still a little unclear so the animators like the director and the visual artists are denying us a lot of information about this guy to make him scarier to make it like oh we can't quite see what's up with him like what what the heck what the heck is his deal we can tell that he's obviously designed to be hot like that's pretty clear just from looking at him but they're making conscious decisions about how to present the character in order to get the feeling from him that we want which again here like even though he's he's done this dramatic stepping forward and he's raising his arm to like uh demand you return the thing to still keeping him just out of our sight so that all of a sudden now we get to see him so that this moment becomes the real reveal of who and what he is and that comes down to his characterization as well viego here is not a man who can be reasoned with which is essentially what senna is trying to do here like she's like you don't belong in this world you'll destroy the world if you keep doing what you're doing would you please stop like she's essentially trying to talk him out of it a little bit before raising her weapon uh because she realizes that there's no talking to this guy and at this point you see like his you see his expression change you can see he begins to show his teeth he begins to sort of just sort of bear himself he drops his weight down low and does this ghost teleportation dash thing and now we get the full reveal of who he is and who this character is is someone who will choke a person if they don't give him exactly what he wants the moment that he demands it this is the introduction to his character someone who seems calm and composed and in control right up until the moment anyone or anything defies him at which point he will immediately resolve resort to rather brutal violence so the storytelling of who viego is as a character like just through the way that he's framed just through the specifics of how the action plays out there's a lot of storytelling going on for who he is what he is what he wants and how he acts in order to get that and i really like the effects on this ghost dash here because what we basically have is like they generate the smoke effect over his body then they dissolve his actual body and then replace with this flash of green light for like one two three four frames four frames is pretty much all we get and then we get like this smear that resolves into like his body reappearing out of the smoke you can see how he literally just appears from around one frame to another there's no slow assembly here there doesn't need to be one he just appears all of a sudden which again is what sells like that like that suddenness of like oh yeah no like a person would probably not be able to react to that kind of thing and now we get like the facial expressions and again compare and contrast that with tales of runeterra shorts where the expressions on the characters tend to be kind of exaggerated and cartoony even on human characters like graves and twisted fate like there tends to be a lot more obvious facial acting going on not that this guy is exactly being subtle right now but like the little creases and lines in his forehead from like the eyebrows coming down and like him like you can tell that he's tensed up with anger here the little curl of the lip as he reveals his teeth and pulls back there's like she is my world like that and cinna like realizing oh my god this guy isn't in cell you can see the realization on cena's face right like it's not necessarily just that she's scared of him it's that she's realizing exactly what kind of person that he is that he's just told her she is my world i don't give a [ __ ] if i destroy all of runeterra i want what i want and nobody is going to stop me from getting what i want no matter how much that's going to hurt literally everyone else on the planet again this is who viego is and senna is realizing it and again this is not like a subtle expression as such but it's a great deal subtler than for example tristana's expression in the yordle short from yesterday when like graves fires his gun and she's shocked at that that's a very different thing than from what's going on here as we see senna realize just the extent to which this guy is creepy as hell and a complete lunatic and then you know the the fading away and that by the way is a lovely bit of subtle facial animation because here she's looking at him and she's realizing and then as he begins to extract the ruined queen from her you can see how she like you can see her eyes lose focus you can see the little twitches of the actually again let me zoom in i keep forgetting that i have a high resolution picture to work with this time and we can actually go in real close and really see what's going on here you see that you see that little subtle twitch of the lower eyelid and then what that there all it is is that it goes from here to there and all of a sudden she loses focus all of a sudden you can see that like the clarity goes out of her sight she's not looking at something anymore and that's being sold even further with a slight just a slight you can see how the complete blackness of her pupils gets cast over with just a little bit of green here just to indicate like that that her stare is going blank and then we get the lighting effects beginning to pour out really showing that like she's completely like she's losing consciousness essentially that she she's losing focus and that's like especially like the little eyelid twitches just at the bottom they're sort of indicating that this is there's a weird tension going on with her eyes like when she's trying to maintain control and losing it that's oh gorgeous absolutely gorgeous and then more lovely visual effects and by the way credit to the visual effects artists here like i said the smoke and the particle effects are probably like something you tell the computer generate x amount like x number of particles here and stuff but there's still a vfx animator who has to like manage even if you're using like a an algorithm to say okay so create like have the particles sort of orbit this central spot around here there's still an animator who has to make decisions about exactly how that presents and manage exactly how those algorithms play out and like manage stuff like how these tendrils of blackness sort of curl in all around the light orb at the front as though they're like you can kind of see how like the the black mist is almost like it's seeking a way in like it's it's like tentacles probing for a way to grab this thing they want it because it's life force and that's just like props to the vfx animators because that's like they did a really damn good job at this and again some lovely subtle facial acting lucian goes from blasting monsters with his gun here's his killer face to and all it is it's just that it's that little raise of the eyebrows opening up the eyes just a little bit more and he goes from anger to concern and shock and again like the vfx artists doing an absolutely brilliant job because again all of this flow like look at the visual flow of all the smoke here right we have this central light pillar coming up from the ruined king and sena moving into the sky so we have this flow of smoke moving upwards and look how everything else in the scene conforms to enhance that like you have all the smoke from the ground you can see that sort of being pulled up in the wake essentially by convection and you can see how all the like the smoke out on the sides here and all of that all of that is rising commensurate to that rising power so the whole scene has this lifting feeling to it really sort of giving you the sensor oh tremendous power is being unleashed here and which again some vfx artist and the director had to make some conscious decisions about making that happen it doesn't happen automatically as the immortal bastion bursts out into smoke and devils and i'm gonna have some theories about what exactly is going on here sort of in terms of lore mechanics uh in a later video but suffice it to say that the the immortal bastion especially has some pre-existing connections to like the undead and undead warlords who want to take over the world like that's a thing that the mortal bastion is familiar with through mordekaiser whether or not there's a mordekaiser connection here and i do have to wonder like what does mordekaiser think about this other king of death showing up and doing like trying to take over the world with an undead army that's his thing like he's basically stealing mordekaiser's whole shtick is he just gonna sit there and take it he's just gonna he's like the guy showed up to the party wearing the same dress dude you should at least say something someone has to change surely anyway we cut to my girl samira uh hanging out just being her being cool being too too cool for whatever the hell it is darius is doing the triferion legion back you're probably doing some kind of inspiring speech to them about why it's good to die for an empire or something which it isn't but uh we'll let him have it we'll let him have it the poor boy i i love samira's character design i've talked about that in the what's the deal video already but she's like she's like yeah if you're gonna have like the sexy hot lady with a sword thing then samira is just such a good damn way to do it and notice again the physical staging of the scene because knowing absolutely nothing else about these characters who would you like take a look at them and try and see okay imagine what would your first impression of them be if this was the first image you saw of samira and darius ever if you'd never met them before you didn't know anything about them what would your assumption be about who she is relative to him and like what kind of relationship she has to her environment because take a look at this that wall right there samira in this in the image first of all she's lit differently than the other characters like all the triferion legion back here are mostly black um like they're mostly in shadow rather um and they are lit with like this bright white edge lighting that's sort of desaturated and they look kind of colorless over there like darius has this bright red cloak and there's like this orange fire in the background but mostly this is pretty desaturated it's pretty colorless there's not a lot going on here by contrast over here within the the confines of of this stack of crates in this wall samira is lit with very warm bright light like she's very colorful you can see the gold and the red and you can see like the color of her skin she's like someone who looks like she has the hot breath of life in her so just visually you can instantly tell that she is not of the same kind as they because she doesn't look anything like them because she's lit differently from them and most importantly she's separated in the frame by a literal wall between her and them now she's not so apart from them that she's not part of the same city like you can tell okay she's in more or less the same space but she's apart from them in the sense that she's not a part of the rank and file she's not one of the faceless soldiers this one is unique this one does things her own way she's special somehow and you don't know like any specifics about her but you have some idea of okay this is who she is relative to them by the same token look at darius again the soldiers themselves mostly in shadow mostly look mostly like blacks going on like they have these red um loincloths hanging down the front of them but you can't really see the red color at all because they're so in shadow and desaturated darius by contrast you can see the color of his skin you can see the bright red of his cloak so like he's much more associated with these soldiers you can he's physically closer to them he's in the same space but he's also clearly apart from them he looks different he's more colorful he's clearly a different character it's essentially a version of the same exercise you know um spot the anime protagonist right like when you get an anime and you see a classroom and there's like one dude with brightly colored hair and like not wearing a school uniform sitting in the back of the classroom like oh yeah no yeah there's the protagonist he's the only guy who looks that particularly weird this is essentially the same game we're playing except with slightly subtler tools spot the protagonists in this image right so samira is apart from darius like you can tell that she's different from him he's more associated with them but still not the same kind of person that they are like he's not quite the same caliber of warrior that they are he's much more he stands out much more all of that from just what is this like one two seconds two three yeah three or three or four seconds of introduction and we kind of get that right like we can't understand okay and then the next thing here's some character animation samira spots what's happening to the immortal bastion which is like naturally concerned about that and we get this focus pull um where the focus goes from samira in the foreground here she becomes blurred and then the focus shifts in on darius noticing that samira is noticing something i don't know how nobody else in the scene has realized what's happening yet but i guess samira has like a better perception skill check here samira looks pretty big in frame right but look at the way the immortal bastion is framed it looks like a mountain essentially compared so so you get this sense of threat and scope not quite as bad as when senna and lucian were alone on the cliffside and a little bit in tiny and walking into the thing but that happens here now samira gets to be itty bitty and tiny in the screen as these things rush towards her and that's what gives you the sense of danger right like you can see that she's tiny in the screen and then these things come in and they're clearly important they're lit up like what's what are they gonna do they're gonna do something to her this is dangerous there's a threat which is why darius knocks her out of the way and tries to block them swap the scene again now we are in the placidium of navori maybe i i don't remember where karma's monastery is but we're in karma's monastery we are in ionia we have made a quite substantial transition in scene from one frame from uh from one scene to the next so how do we communicate that we are now in a completely different space well look at the colors of noxus we have the gray and brown of the rock we have the red of the banners the steel gray sky red and black are sort of the order of the day when it comes to the colors of the characters that we're seeing some orange fire as well now once we get to karma on the other hand oh all of a sudden the color grading has changed completely everything has sort of this pink orangey light draped all over it like it's it's almost like sunset lighting isn't it we have these green plants and like bright pink flowers and we have a completely different architecture noxus is all boxes and straight lines like it's you can even see it like in the tiling of the floors and like everything here is like straight lines boxes it's very rigid it's very harsh it's very hard lines and then as we swap to ionia everything here is curved everything here is round everything here seems to be composed of circles over and over again we have this circle where karma is fighting the undead we have the circle of this canopy we have the circles in the canopy and even the swirling of the black mist describes a spiraling circle um moving in on karma herself so like just the shape language here is what helps us identify immediately like without any pause without being confused without taking a second to get our bearings we understand oh okay this is a completely different place like this not even remotely the same kind of place at all we need to understand this as a completely separate space in uh in the world and perhaps even a separate space in time except of course the same action is happening here and can i just say i appreciate karma's nose um in this shot i don't know if you know how [ __ ] rare it is but it is incredibly rare to see um like sexy female heroes especially in fantasy media who have a nose that curves that way um the standard nose is the landing strip nose like that little i can never remember the difference between concave and convex but the one that curves inwards and then out like that that's sort of the the disney frozen nose the tangled nose that's the standard fantasy lady knows and this is all the fantasy ladies all over the place all of the time and nobody ever bothers to do anything else it's just nice to see karma and samira have noses that curve a little bit outwards instead it's a rare thing it's a small thing it's something i personally appreciate that like that they just they just try to make faces different sometimes it's a nice thing so you know good on them thank you for doing that that that's that's a good thing because it makes her slightly more identifiable character especially when her entire body and her body type is completely [ __ ] identical to like 150 other goddamn champions in league of legends anyway that's a different discussion so karma versus these things and again we have a switch in scene now we're looking at demacia and again look at the difference in light we have blue skies here we have these like uh we have sort of some of the same sort of blocky architecture as noxus but look at all these domed structures look at all these statues everywhere look at the bright white of the walls here compared to the darkness of noxus look at the golden cornfields that these undead are rushing across again the staging the color the way that buildings and environments are designed does the job of telling us that no no no think of this as a completely different space and then we get my girl poppy my girl poppy doing a bit of bullet time there as she unleashes her alt on these poor idiots who should have known better and to mess with a yordle like we we saw that in the yordle anime show don't mess with yordles and i do like this tracking shot like it's a tracking shot with a camera um like adding to the speed the camera is really low to the ground which always makes all speed seem faster and we get introduced to the hammer first not poppy herself just the hammer first and then her tiny little yordle legs follow and like you have this tracking shot really accentuating the speed of just how quickly she moves and then we get the actual reveal of her which is here more or less um as we get this bullet time shot where she just kind of hangs in the air seemingly unaffected by gravity this is bullet time rather than coyote time because what's going on here is we have this slow-mo effect where everything's slowing down substantially um and then as she reaches like the peak of her jump we get all of a sudden time speeds up again so you get this this this um this feeling of like like everything slows down matrix effects camera swings around and that is from a visual storytelling perspective it does two things first of all it heightens the impact of what poppy is about to do like as visual language goes we've at this point we universally understand that when the camera slows down for a bit right before an action is about to happen that means that that action is a big action like oh this something big is going to happen here whatever this is it's powerful something big is going to happen there's going to be a huge impact and we're sort of wind we're getting more anticipation for it we're having this slow build up to like five four three two one and douche right that's the number one thing the number two thing is that it gives us time to actually get a look at poppy and her gorgeous braids man i hope you update the in-game character model to have those um does she have braids on the in-game character i don't think she does does she it's been a long time since i looked at poppy in game oh well um to actually give us the reveal of poppy as a character like to let us see okay this is a tiny blue person who's a little but she has this big hammer and there's this magical effect thing going on on it and she whacks it into the ground and she kicks those guys ass okay she's a hero uh that's pretty obvious and there's a subtler thing going on as well which is just a good character design on the part of poppy which is that she she has like uh like blue skin which aligns her with the blue of the sky in the blue of the roofs of demacia she has earth tones and earth colors on her character which is like again from a character perspective a character who's all dressed in earth colors and earth tones like they tend to look more friendly than characters who are dressed in for example black and white look at star wars for example compare and contrast like this is one of my favorite examples but compare and contrast the rebels and star wars with the storm troopers and you see this kind of color design being used explicitly to code good guys and bad guys but also like the gold um of the hammer and the hair also aligns with demacian aesthetics which is just a good character design like there's not that much gold in this version of demacia that we see but gold is one of the primary colors um of demacia as well so from a character perspective poppy is just really well designed to look like a demacian champion and i do enjoy like again because we had the yordle short yesterday we might as well compare and contrast there as well here you can really see like in the most explicit terms possible the difference in aesthetic approach between tales of runeterra and the ruination short because tales of runeterra yordles don't look like this they don't have these little sort of fuzzy mottled faces where you can really see that soft fur i want to pet her like i want i what does that what if you stretch that nose is it like is it like scratching the nose of a cat anyway that's a different conversation but especially in the hair poppy's hair looks almost kind of distressingly realistic like it's it's almost like it's a little too realistic isn't it um makes her look a little bit like a doll at least when you slow down like when you look at shots um completely slowed down it's very very highly realistic here compare and contrast that with the way that the tales of room terra shorts yordles are presented where the hair is much more of sort of a unified much more of an anime aesthetic of hair really it's much more of a painted thing um here you get the sense of each goddamn individual strand of her freaking eyelashes in fact let's zoom in on that for a second each individual goddamn strand of her eyelashes is animated you want a picture of the difference between the tales of runeterra shorts and this one in terms of how they approach realism that's the one you got individually rendered eyelashes there you freaking go and i think like personally i think it's cool like i really like seeing poppy um and yordle's general rendered more realistically to give us more of a sense of like how would these characters look if they were actually real and she does look like some kind of fairy creature doesn't she again i think the hair looks a little too human in some ways like i i don't know what you would do like she she is blonde like that's that's just what poppy is but i don't know maybe it could be more bristly maybe it could be more like animal fur or something hmm i don't know that's a difficult thing to solve um that's a really difficult thing to solve because right now it looks a little bit like a wig uh because just because of the contrast between her blue fur and the golden hair hmm i don't know but my god like look at the scales in her armor like this is an exquisitely rendered model and again the lighting in the scene is excellent because pot like everyone else in the scene all the people running in the background they're all in shadow like all of them completely in shadow mostly they're just black silhouettes out of focus in the background poppy on the other hand bright sunlight bursting onto her face fully illuminating her features and her bright golden hair clearly marking her out as the hero here like imagine if she'd been introduced in the same way that the ruined king was introduced like all in shadow with barely any of her face visible kind of thing very different feeling here we instantly see that this is the hero of the story as she does the zoom and i really like this sum as well uh because like she's just called she's just smashed up these rocks right and she's like oh those rocks are in the way just like doesn't care it's [ __ ] debris [ __ ] that [ __ ] boom we're just smashing through everything it's good it's really good and we're doing the same kind of movement um aesthetic that we did with the rune king remember how with the ruined king is there's this big brief build up as he like drops his body weight and then becomes a wraith and then all of a sudden he's just there same thing happens with poppy here you can see like she she does this wind up where she pulls out her shield you can see like she changes her body weight drops down on one knee like she's a sprinter getting ready to run and then boom she just disappears she disappears into motion blur and this bright lighting effect and then it's just like and the camera follows suit like the camera follows suit not just tracking her but you can see how the entire space of the camera's field of view there's just motion blur all over the goddamn thing really communicating just the scale of speed that we're working with you can see how the field of vision is even distorting as we dash through the scene with her and then that's used as a transition point to get us back to darius who's holding back these whatever the hell they are is and we figure out what it was those tendrils were trying to do to pour samira and what we get here is two bits of visual storytelling first the glowing white eyes um which we first saw on viego we first saw these bright glowing eyes on the ruined king and then we get the crown which again is something that you will have spotted when we were looking at the ruined king let's see if we can get a close-up same shapes same bright white eyes so for the observant uh person there's a visual obvious connection if i can find it between okay so clearly mr mr weird in-cell guy same thing going on here so there's some kind of possession thing going on so even without being told you understand okay this is some kind of mind control like we've seen this kind of thing before we've got mind control going on and again we cut back to ionia and once again curves circles and even like the tendrils of darkness that are going to spiral in on poor karma describe a spiral or a circle um to really show like to really maintain that visual aesthetic of the scene which is also reflected in the uh circling jade dragons um that spin behind poor karma as uh dear mr ruined king tries to do the same thing again with his little possession thing which fortunately doesn't work on karma but we don't know that yet in the storytelling of this thing we have this three act structures well maybe not three acts but we have this this sort of um this clear delineation of structures we have a moment of peace before the start where lucian and sena are just hanging out she's giving him [ __ ] for not maintaining his guns properly he's like ha ha i love you my wife i love you so much i'm never going to let anyone hurt you ever i have a deep emotional complex about your safety um but they're just kind of hanging out and talking and and talking [ __ ] as a shadow slowly moves up on lucian like you can literally see the the shadow coming in over him here as the looming threat comes in then we have the reveal of the threat like a cena gets the glowy eyes and the message about oh god the black mist is coming then we get the first bit of action um as lucian and cena like charging and lucian starts blasting these things to pieces confrontation with the bad guy and then we have the first climax which is when viego grabs senna reclaims at least part of the spirit of his wife and unleashes the ruination that's the first emotional climax then we get a second set of setups where we see like samira anderia spawning what's going on we see karma in full combat with these undead monstrosities and we get the setup of demacia where poppy is doing some fighting against the undead okay cool and then we get darius getting possessed karma getting possessed lucian like in a in a pretty desperate battle with these undead bastards if my scrolling would please please behave properly thank you and samira doing exactly the same thing and in fact there's a lovely a consonant between the two of them because what happens like i really like the transition from from lucian fighting the undead to samira fighting the undead because what happens is lucian blasts this guy in the gut that's a really nice maneuver very john wick and then points out blasts this guy and then right as he does that we cut to samira doing exactly the same thing like she's well it's not blasting it but she's like exploding and undead and then boom so like there's this visual action um continuity between the two of them they're doing the same action they're both of them fighting the same threat which again visual storytelling pretty well done as all of a sudden samira has to deal with something that's potentially even worse um and these are the all as lost moments right like these are the lowest points of our heroes where they are most in peril and most under threat same thing goes for poppy here who's fighting pretty much alone as the gates come down behind her against these undead bastards which she can probably handle because she's pretty damn good at this stuff but then like we get multiple of them coming at her which is like a perilous situation to be in when oh hello vayne is here and she's going to [ __ ] murder poppy for being a magical creature that one's never really explained because vayne hates all magic all of it she hates the undead she hates demons she hates mages she hates everything that is magical or like unnatural very large air quotes hates it wants it all dead wants to kill it on site she sees yordles she sees poppy and apparently decides that like okay we we're cool with her now i guess even though her entire life quest has been all about murdering the this guy okay like but apparently she's cool with yordles or maybe she doesn't see that poppy is a yordle who knows the whole yordle situation about who knows and who doesn't know that they're real is frankly not very well explained in the league of legends universe i'll let it go for now but anyway vayne and poppy look at each other and then poppy swings her hammer is like oh she's gonna attack the lady except of course boom she's attacking the undead because poor poppy is a very polite person who would never attack a lady like that then they look at each other they get this little sort of badass recognizing badass and then it's like back to fighting so we got the all is lost moment and then we got sort of the first um like the first sign of hope at least for poppy that like okay now she has an ally she's not fighting alone anymore they can hold off this horde together let me come back here this is the all is lost moment for um samira um and lucian for senna and lucian god damn it i'm bad with names and here's samira's always lost moment when the darkness is encroaching like you can literally see um in the shot right here how the darkness is closing in and sort of becoming overwhelming as she's trying to fight off darius boom and he knocks her down here's the all his lost moment for karma and then again emotional climax as she breaks free of the control which is probably something she can do because she is literally imbued with some of the most powerful spirits in all of ionia which she demonstrates beautifully by doing a thing she definitely can't do in-game i would like that to be her ultimate riot please instead of that dumb mantra thing like give her like double jade dragons just [ __ ] clearing that would be cool um as lucian takes action all his lost moment averted we get an emotional climax senna is saved from whatever the hell the ruined king is doing to her he is distracted and because of that we see all of this we see this like all these very concrete like you can see these are very sharp tendrils of smoke and darkness all like flowing up in a very unified specified direction they begin to collapse into nothingness like a sand castle falling apart basically as senna gets shot in i do like the way he tumbles he's like hahaha i have one i am so cool i am the ruined king i'm like and the way he tumbles like a ragdoll like it's a really good tumble it undercuts him really nicely because it just looks so silly like he looks like such an idiot [Laughter] so senna gets her own back um which again from a visual storytelling perspective i think they did that just so that senna wouldn't be a damsel in distress for the whole thing which is kind of the thing that like that was at risk of happening is like senna is like yeah i'm gonna fight the darkest and then she immediately just gets grabbed by him and doesn't get a chance to fight back at all and then lucian has to save her i think they put this moment in just to make sure that they weren't uh accidentally presenting senna as defenseless um as she gets her own back on the dumb idiot and he's just basically like like she's trying to distract him from from assault basically uh which she manages to do successfully as he calls upon the blade of the ruined king which is this part this is the blade of the rune king that you can buy in game the pommel and the hilt this ridiculously penis compensating contraption that he's got going on here that's all viego himself though which again as a character design element i feel like it represents his personality pretty well because it's so [ __ ] extra like it's just it's just so much more than it needs to be which is very much viego himself he's like he's an extra boy like he's he's he's a bit much on on every possible axis he's a bit much as senna is down they're being encroached upon by like demons from all sides lucian has to make some kind of decision and look at the color design of this scene i really freaking loved that this the first time i saw it we have the colors of the ruined king which is like the colors of the shadow eyes like the black smoke and the sort of the bright teal and and and blue and all the coldness just encroaching in from all sides as viego himself makes the move towards senna but here in the center the spirit of the ruined queen and cena herself and the bright light of life just red and orange like the hot breath of life the the color of a sunset glowing through just a little bit highlighting the center like highlighting literally highlighting you can see there's essentially a spotlight on cena here in the middle highlighting the choice that lucian has to make between fighting all of this or saving that specifically this he should probably have tried to save that as well but specifically this so the visual storytelling here is aiding the character storytelling really really well like we can see the binary choice that he has to make here save her fight them you can't do both make a decision senna is essentially pleading with him uh like to would you please fight the ruined king because that's more important like save save assault fight the ruined king because she's a self-sacrificing lady and lucian with all of his many emotional issues about his wife being dead and tortured for many many years which like to be fair is understandable makes a somewhat different decision which senna realizes that as they go over the cliff is like oh no he left her behind and splash into the water anyway the ruined king gets what he wants but one thing to notice in terms of the visual storytelling here how does he act once like this is ostensibly the soul of his queen the one thing that he cares about more than anything else in the known universe except when he absorbs her that's it that's all his reaction he absorbs and then he walks away and the feeling i get from that is that this is not his final triumph like this is not he has not recovered his wife yet he's not fully recovered who she is this is part one of his plan this is like this is thanos after getting like the first few infinity gems and being satisfied and walking off it's not thanos with the gauntlet getting ready to snap yet essentially like that's more a thing of satisfaction of like okay part one is done i'm gonna get exactly what i want and because i'm getting what i want i'm gonna stop throwing my stupid [ __ ] tantrum which is when um the ruination stops happening elsewhere in runeterra as we see as we get to the next part where everybody's sort of recovering from what happened it's like diego has gotten what he wanted his temper tantrum is over and now the the sigil um of the light seekers or the light sentinels uh closes us out as the various characters begin to recover and sort of try and process what the hell just happened to them specifically senna is like you dumb [ __ ] you left her behind like she's the one thing that he wanted and you just let him have it it's like god damn it well she's not quite like that she's like we have to go back for her and you can see that in her facial expression again again that facial acting is just really really good it's concern like she's like [ __ ] we have to go back for her she wants to save this poor soul that she has carried inside her for a long time and lucian is like no [Laughter] like no no we're we're not we're not doing that alone that's a bad idea we need allies who might those allies be you ask well the short is going to show us here's samira he's like hey you're not trying to kill me anymore that's cool and darius and noxus here is karma in ionia sort of distressed by what just happened like i must imagine it must be especially shocking for her because like at least in noxus they know that that used to be mordekaiser's immortal bat like maybe they have some idea like okay maybe there's some dangerous magic here somewhere that we need to be prepared for karma was just like hanging out and vibing she was just doing meditation [ __ ] in ionia and then all of a sudden undead invasion just happens like she must be so [ __ ] confused right now it's like the [ __ ] like i i want you to sit in here and then you come along and you attack me and you just [ __ ] off what the hell it must be so confusing and then we have vayne and poppy discovering at least as far as i can tell i think this is the thing that unleashed um this is the source of that light beam that shot into the sky and unleashed the undead i think this is some artifact or something that the light sentinels have sealed away beneath their sigil in the ground or something along those lines who knows it's it's all plot set up for like this is the post-credits scene essentially the kind of thing you'd get after a marvel movie teasing what's going to be happening in the next marvel movie or the next avengers film or the what the hell ever um just setting up that this sigil is important and something's going to be happening is about that matters somehow so remember what this thing looks like bye and that's the end of the animated short oh boy how long is this gonna be this video i don't even know because i'm recording it in multiple takes so it could be two hours for all i know probably not but it's quite good like it's a lot of really really high quality like just freaking look at lucian's coat here like look at all this is something i love in character design something league of legends i've criticized league of legends for it before that characters in the game are never dirty like they're never actually scuffed up and dirty they never really look like they've like they don't have scars they don't have battle damage they don't have anything they just look physically perfect like they've never gone through a hard day of work in their lives look at lucian's coat here though like look at all the scuffs and scrapes look at the dirt coming i usually haven't washed this thing in like six months it must stink to high heaven or whatever i really like that i like that you can see the scars and from undead creatures that have been clawing at him like you can see the wear and tear of the life that he leads on his clothes which is such a lovely thing like this there is just good character design like it's just good character design to have a character's life show in the kind of clothes that they wear and by the way as a point of contrast look at senna's outfit she hasn't been fighting undead for a while like she hasn't been in the game of like getting clawed and beaten up by monstrosities for a bit she's been she's been going through some other [ __ ] like she hasn't had it easy or anything but you can tell by senna it's like oh she's she's somewhat cleaner and better maintained because she hasn't been fighting through hell and high water for the last 10 years trying to save her husband from a lantern it's the other way around so she's a little bit cleaner she's a little bit more well maintained as it were and that's a nice contrast between them is that lucian is all kind of worn ragged and he looks a little bit exhausted just from the way that his coat looks he looks like he's taking a lot of damage like he's a little like like like like he could use some tender loving care basically whereas senna by contrast looks so much more clean and composed and undamaged in a lot of ways even though arguably senna is the one between them who has taken a lot more damage over the years uh it's just a good point of care to contrast like that lucian is the one who's all worn out and who's not really in the mood to try and fight the entire shadow isles all by himself and who's gonna caution cena hey like cena maybe maybe we can't just fight that guy alone maybe we need some allies the character design is doing some of the work of of establishing that contrast between them and i think it's really good i really like it anyway good animated short damn high production values uh probably we won't be seeing a lot of those unless riot has been planning to make them for a while because producing something like this takes a good long while i enjoyed it we're gonna have a discussion video about all of the lore theories and what might be coming next like oh this shot like again what i was talking about look at this like you can just see like it's not that there's no scuffs or anything like not that this doesn't look like stuff that's been through some [ __ ] but look at lucian just how ragged he looks compared to it so good like even even his his white coat is like way darker than her white coat it's good it's really good it's the lighting does that as well um right if you enjoyed this video with my long ramble i'm gonna stop now before i go off on another tangent you can hit the like comment and subscribe buttons down below that's very helpful because it tells the algorithm hey this video was a video that was like okay it was decent like other people should be allowed to see that too i guess and the algorithm will go oh okay some people think this video is worth watching i guess i'll show it to other people so if you want to help out a youtuber whether it's me or someone else clicking those buttons is actually a thing that that that that does something um i also have a patreon i have a merchandise store i have a tip jar oh yes this channel is fully monetized believe you me because that's how i you know it's how i pay my rent these days and if you want to help me do that i'd be very grateful for the help but if you don't want to or you can't because of all of the everything that's happening don't worry about it it's completely okay um the argument i do make at the end of my videos 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well also that would be oh it knocked my microphone um that would be good as well i would appreciate it and outside of that thank you very much for watching please remember to wear a mask and wash your hands and once the vaccine comes i beg of you please take it and make your parents do the same no matter what kind of stupid facebook pages they've been looking at please because i want to go outside soon i want to go out i don't want to be inside anymore and try to act in solidarity when you can with those who are working hard to make the world a better place [Music] you

Channel: T B Skyen

Views: 44,072

Keywords: tbskyen, animation, breakdown, analysis, discussion, explained, explanation, lore, story, backstory, writing, ruined king, viego, new champion, senna, lucian, samira, darius, poppy, vayne, karma, ionia, noxus, demacia, shadow isles, blessed isles, isolde, ruined queen, cinematic, animated, animated short, trailer, season trailer, league of legends, LoL, riot games, gaming, runeterra, legends of runeterra, wild rift

Id: B7Eanbva42E

Length: 66min 39sec (3999 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021