Resources about animated splash art

Question

I have always been fascinated in these stuff:

• Blizzard's "live" banners
• Riot's "live" character splash screens

Do they have a specific name I could google and teach myself the art of creating them? I have experience in graphics rendering, but I assume some far less complicated tricks are used to achieve the illusion of 3D and animation in the current examples. I also assume, that Flash is the most convenient platform to build such effects. I am not interested in actionscript tutorials, rather the specific techniques to make banners look like "3D" and "alive".

Answer 1

After a week I stumbled upon an answer by a complete coincidence. Turns out there is a whole science based on such things, called Motion Graphics.

A typical software, used for the creation of such things is Adobe After Effects, and the effect I was trying to achieve is called Cinemagraph. Therefore such designs can be achieved by following cinemagraph tutorials.