Crimson Daggers — Art forum

Hi all. I was wondering if there was a name for this style of "animation". This is the new trailer for Magic: The Gathering called "Theros Trailer":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNewZZPKH-U

More importantly, I was wondering how the heck did they manipulate those illustrations (which were created by several artists)?? Someone mentioned that the animation team did NOT utilize layers--from the original artwork--to achieve these effects. If that's true, I figure a lot of re-painting had to be done for this...

Do you think they used After Effects? I don't own AE, though I've always been curious to try it out.. but that's my best guess, I have no idea what software they could have used... :/ It makes me pretty bummed because it's beautiful. ;-; I would love to try that out someday.

From the amount of light effects I assume it's After Effects. And that's style is called Kinematic Rig or Skeleton Kinematic Rig http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fn7clD8NiI Maybe they did not separate graphic on layers (which I doubt) but it's still time consuming animation. Bone animation is also available in software like Adobe Flash, Toon Boom and Anime Studio. Part of today animated series is made in thous :)

Thank you!! Yeah, it seems pretty impossible to do without the original layers..but then there's so many advancements I'm not aware of..