Doodling Between the Headlines — The Times

We worked with The Times newspaper to create a film for the Euros, promoting their coverage of the football tournament.

Our Idea

Inspired by how people doodle over newspapers, we used The Times’ coverage of the games, doodling between the headlines to join the hero moments into one continuous animated highlights reel that told the story of the tournament.

The animation was created over the 4 week tournament and released the morning after the final.

  • Doodline between the lines bts 04
  • Doodline between the lines bts 02
  • Doodline between the lines bts 01

The Process

Each day we chose a newsworthy moment from the ongoing coverage, selecting the best photographs to become the ‘keyframes’ in our animated story.

Using Cinema 4D we created character sequences, animating the footballers’ body positions to get from one photo to the next.

As the tournament progressed, the frames of our digital animation were then individually traced onto the newspaper page by page.

Creating the animation in chapters as the tournament was progressing, enabled us to release the stop motion highlights film (usually a notoriously slow process) almost immediately after the final.