The final moments of the opening ceremonies for the 2022 League of Legends World Championship featured star performer ...
...Lil Nas X seemingly lifted into the air by the hand of a giant mech while a championship trophy floated around him.
It was an impressive display of artistic vision and technical expertise — and it’s also the reason Carrie Dunn, creative director for Riot esports, has been a little stressed of late.
“Any time you hoist a cultural superstar in the air for your finale,” she says, “there’s anxiety in that.”
This year, with the promise of a return to a packed arena at the Chase Center in San Francisco, the team wanted to create a spectacle that would work both for those in the audience and fans watching at home.
Instead, they decided to utilize multiple technologies, including a massive jumbotron-style display at ground level and ...
...a stage covered with thousands of LED tiles. Arguably the highlight, though, is the impressively huge holograms.
But it was also utilized for much smaller and more complex moments.
“The technical complexity and ambition this year is, in my experience, a new peak,” executive producer Nick Troop explains.
In addition to all of the holographic mesh and LED stage, pulling off this year’s ceremony required 55 cameras, a nine-story-tall ...
...lighting truss, 24 30K projectors, and a media center setup “capable of driving up to 600 million pixels,” according to Troop.
“That is more than double our last Worlds final in an arena,” explains Troop. Photo by Kelly Sullivan/Riot Games Inc. via Getty Images.
“His charisma and presence on stage is so undeniable,” she explains.
“His choreography ability is unmatched, and this section of ‘Fire to the Fuse’ is very nuanced and very technical, and we needed somebody who… it’s not just that they can dance, it’s that they ...
...can dance no-holds-barred at a fast pace while hitting very precise and technical cues. His section is so tightly linked to the technology and the Holonet that there is zero room for error.”
“His charisma and presence on stage is so undeniable.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s the Summoner’s Cup until it has that moment on stage at finals and then being lifted by our pro players,” Dunn says.
“We took this moment very seriously as our chance to induct it into the sport.”