A Highlight Reel of Euro 2016 Comes to Life on a Newspaper

Animators Wriggles and Robbins return with ‘Doodling Between the Headlines,' a stop-motion animation which features a fan and newspapers.

by DJ Pangburn

July 17, 2016, 12:00pm

All images courtesy the artists

After creating a shadowy and fantastical stop-motion animation with Nightlife, wherein beasts traverse the nighttime London landscape, animators Wriggle and Robbins have turned to the Euro 2016 football tournament. The two artists wanted to create an animated highlights reel of the tournament, but do so in a way that hasn't been done before.

"The plan was to make a film that captures all the big stories as they happened, from the unexpected Icelandic heroes to the moth that landed on Ronaldo in the final," Matt Robinson tells The Creators Project. "The film was created by collecting newspaper coverage throughout the games. Over the four-week period we doodled on the pages so that when blown in the wind the drawings would animate together, connecting all the headlines from the tournament."

To create the project, Wriggles and Robbins had to collect four weeks worth of newspapers every day. The two would then select certain articles that captured a significant moment, then sent the layout to a local animation studio called Treat Studios.

"They were then creating blocks of animation to get us from our last newspaper photo to the latest one," says Robinson. "They were awesome considering they had so little time to turn around a piece of animation."

"We had one main illustrator translating that animation into doodles that he would illustrate onto each page frame by frame," he adds. "He was doodling each section of animation onto the newspaper pages throughout the tournament."

To get the pages consistent, Wriggle and Robbins had to film scenes a number of times, because they could never get the whole newspaper to flow perfectly. "With each take there would be a small section that would animate properly, so we could use that and move on to capturing another bit," Robinson says. "We could also cut to different angles when a bunch of pages would fly over together."

Viewers see a mesmerizing flow of newspaper pages despite this patchwork editing of the numerous takes. Not only does the video reveal a unique animation technique, but it showcases a totally different way of watching a sports highlight reel.