Lunar Revel Skinline.
I led the internal marketing team, external vendors and freelancers to develop the idea and oversee execution of the most popular Lunar New Year cinematic for League of Legends: Wild Rift. All works displayed © Riot Games 2022-2025.
Role
Product
Duration
Year
League's Holiday Commercial
To help Wild Rift succeed in its key market (APAC) in 2022, the marketing team made a big push to celebrate Lunar New Year (the biggest holiday in the region) using the Firecracker skinline. Being a US-based team, we had to enshrine East-Asian customs and avoid any cultural faux-pas, all the while producing a clear and relevant story on an accelerated timeline.
Almost Home
Having carte blanche from our IP team, we developed a story that leaned hard into the reality of our players in the region. Nearly a billion people travel home during the holiday to be with their families, some of them for the first time in three years after the Covid lockdowns. They needed a feel-good piece to accompany them on their stressful journeys. So we took inspiration from the masters of tugging at the heartstrings in fantasy settings: Studio Ghibli.
Working with our internal writer and external storyboard artists, we crafted a journey of five strangers becoming fast friends on their journey home. Cultural touchpoints were seeded throughout the piece, from the crowdedness of the train (the most popular mode of transport) to the deliciousness of the feast at home. We also managed to incorporate enough conflict for champions to use their abilities (key selling point for skins) without making the holiday commercial overly gritty.
The Fast and the (culturally) Furious
Working with a main production vendor in China made it easier to incorporate cultural Easter Eggs. However, the language barrier and tight timeline made it necessary to provide them precise direction at every stage of the process. We painted over layout frames, concept art, backgrounds; made changes to the edit; and acted out animations for nearly every shot. The Firecracker world was developed with a separate pre-production vendor, and multiple freelance and Riot artists contributed storyboards along the way. Thank you to all who made this holiday celebration possible!
An 8k version of the final cinematic was played on loop in Shanghai Airport during the holiday in 2022.
(Click to watch and learn more)
