Arcane is probably my favorite TV show ever, and this is for a lot of reasons, the storyline, the character development, the music, the animation, and much much more. Arcane was made by Riot games in partnership with an amazing french animation studio called Fortiche, and in this blog, I am gonna try to break down why Arcane’s animation is so breathtaking!
The Fortiche way
Hand-painted
Fortiche’s animation style has always been different from other animation studios, making their animations look like each frame was a beautiful oil painting, and how they do it is perfectly captured by the answer to the question:
How do you make it look like a painting?
“we paint”
Fortiche uses a combination of 2D and 3D methods, all the characters are 3D modeled, but every frame is then hand painted. Unlike a lot of other animations, all of Arcan’s backgrounds are also hand painted, and then wrapped on a 3D model, the same is done with all the visual FX including the smoke, dramatic lighting trails from weapons like the atlas gauntlet, explosions, etc.
Creative freedom
Fortiche is a studio run by artists, and Riot gave that studio all the creative freedom in the world, making the scripts more like guidelines than rules. Animators were sometimes given just phrases like “she lifted her eyebrow” and they would make a full scene out of that. This freedom allowed this show to stand out, and have brilliant scenes like the Ekko versus Jinx fight.
Motion
Arcane, unlike many video games and 3D projects, didn’t use motion capture, and while motion capture looks realistic, they decided to veer away from that idea and create animations with traditional methods that made the animation a whole lot more expressive and less stiff since they were able to add exaggeration in things like squash and stretch, character expressions and movements, the poses, etc.
Detail
Arcane’s animation and visuals are supremely detailed, and the animators at Fortiche are experts at placing the details exactly where they have to be, in some shots the background is minimalistic, and the character is the piece of art on display, and vice versa is also true, even when the character is in the middle of the scene, the show makes sure you know if you have to focus on the background. The details also help you identify where in the world of Arcane a specific scene is taking place using colors, The overcity is bright, blue, and clean, the undercity is dark, with muted colors, and full of garbage.
These are the combined views of mine, and all my research, if you want a look at the entire process of making arcane from when Riot games got the idea, to the final gala, here’s a link to their official documentary series on youtube- bridging the rift.
