Hi yes. A senior person who handles the scripts for these here!
I am not a League dev. I don't make the game. So I have no idea what the teams are working on until I talk to them. The process is:
Talk to League leadership to understand a high level view of what we want to talk about. (This is a week or so to account for schedules and PTO.)
Reach out to the development teams themselves to fill in the details. This takes a pretty big chunk of our time because we want to make sure we're not too disruptive of their time. For example Phroxzon is the lead on Summoner's Rift Team, and his team does active game balance, Preseason, midscopes, and they write stuff like Quick Gameplay Thoughts and Patch Notes. They're busy folks and I gotta give them space to do their jobs!
My fellow writers and I get started actually writing the thing. We take everything the devs give us and put it into a script that sounds cohesive, coherent, and has good structure.
Feedback time baby! The devs, teams, leadership, and marketing folks all give feedback on everything. We make adjustments and iterations. This can go on and on and on.
Filming days! We film with production crew. This is a few hours per shoot.
Post-production is the biggest amount of work. We shoot for a few hours. Our editor attends the shoot (virtually because of COVID) and usually writes down which takes are best. But even then sometimes someone will look off camera for a second so we gotta get creative. Then in here is b-roll capture. We work with the amazing gameplay capture artists who stage the suggested gameplay capture like "Kassadin places ward in bot lane tri from dragon pit."
Post also includes color correction, sound editing, all of the visual effects, AND feedback! We might get to a point where we think we've got it good and then have to cut entire swathes of the video because of any number of things: feedback, stuff going on in the community, etc.
And then as someone mentioned localization is the final step. Not only do the teams need to localize all of the spoken words, the SRTs need to be organized as well.
And (I guess really final step) is figuring out WHEN to publish it. Loads of different teams at Riot have stuff to publish as well, and Star Guardian was an active event for a huge amount of the summer, with tons of content going out left and right. So figuring out the best date to release sometimes means waiting a bit longer.
But yes these get filmed far in advance. For example, Season Start dev video scripts are written before Preseason releases and filmed in the first or second week it's live.
Hope this gives some clarity!
Edit to add: I checked back on my calendar. We filmed at the end of June, so months is kinda right if you go by months but date-wise it was about a month and 2 weeks!
During this time don't forget we have Riot summer break. And even if we film that doesn't mean post begins the next day!
devtrackers.gg