I started out by creating all the tech to make the animation look as much like the animatic as I could in limited time: this required shaders with different stencil buffers for both regular sprites and ones that blended their shape. I also wrote the scripts that would display the correct opponent character and name, and properly morphed the background shape.

Then, I used Unity keyframe animations to lay down a first version of the animation, ready to spend a while tweening, refining and polishing.