London Special: The Line

You wouldn’t expect an animation collective that nearly called itself Studio Boobio to create sweetly emotional spots like Talk Talk TV’s Date Night and Freeview Play’s Set Yourself Free. But don’t let this and The Line’s eventually sensible name fool you. Their latest pub-inspired ideas, from ninja rabbits to a pixelated Leo DiCaprio, show this band of boys has a retro-loving, fun and crazy side, too

Poor old Leonardo DiCaprio – he went through hell to claim that Oscar. As if being mauled by a bear and sleeping in a hollowed-out horse wasn’t enough, The Revenant’s star then had to race his competitors down the red carpet, dodging Lady Gaga, paparazzi and the odd iceberg along the way…

Oh, hang on – that was only a game. But what a game. With its killer combination of retro 8-bit design and sharp satire, Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage proved a viral hit in the run-up to this year’s Oscars, racking up more three million plays worldwide, garnering global media attention and putting its creators, London-based animators and directing collective The Line, firmly on the map.

Meeting James Duveen, Bjørn-Erik Aschim, Wesley Louis, Tim McCourt and brothers Max and Sam Taylor, it’s clear that success hasn’t gone to their heads. Laid-back and chatty, with a genuine camaraderie, their shared passion for animation shows itself in the doodles gradually covering their notepads. 

Drawing on individual strengths

Like all good partnerships, The Line developed organically. The six had crossed each other’s paths as friends and colleagues before they began sharing studio space in East London.

After collaborating in a piecemeal fashion on the BAFTA-nominated short film, Everything I Can See From Here, their first truly collective work was the cult anime video for Mat Zo and Porter Robinson’s house track Easy. Although they’d made two major film projects, they still hadn’t made up a name. Pages of terrible options followed (Corporate Raiders From Dimension X, Studio Boobio…) before McCourt said: “Let’s draw a line under it.” The rest is history.

Three years later, The Line shows no sign of breaking. “As directors, we all have the same capability but because we come from slightly different backgrounds we have specialised skills: some of us are good at layouts and backgrounds, some are better at characters,” says Aschim. When a brief comes in, “it’s a question of looking at each individual’s skills”, as well as their appetite for the project. Either way, “There hasn’t been a big fight yet,” laughs Louis.

Rampaging onto gaming’s red carpet

The Line’s impressive reel balances personal passion projects, such as 80s cartoon homage/VR experience Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit, with commercials like Talk Talk TV’s Date Night, for which they teamed up with Electric Theatre Collective and Academy Films.

ETC became the group’s representation and offered vital support for The Line’s next ad, Freeview Play’s Set Yourself Free – a surprisingly emotional story of three lonely souls breaking out of a dystopian world of conformist TVs. It was their first experience of working in 3D and the biggest ad they’d ever done; ETC’s input proved invaluable. “It was a really good opportunity for us to work with an amazing production pipeline and all these super-talented people,” says Taylor.

Having made a name for themselves in the advertising and animation worlds, a little side project called Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage brought The Line into the public eye this year. “I’d been looking at pixel art online, and had always wanted to make a game, and [Sam and I] had the idea of doing something around Leonardo DiCaprio trying to win the Oscar.

Such a stupid idea!” recalls Aschim. Enlisting game developer Max van der Merwe, they put the game together in just three weeks, releasing it early after a beta version was leaked online. Within two hours …Rampage had been picked up by Mashable and BuzzFeed, and was soon averaging 1,000 plays a minute.

Tracking the geographic spread via Google Analytics, Taylor recalls a “mix of excitement and terror”. Aside from the fear of being sued for defamation, server space and bandwidth costs spiralled due to ever-increasing traffic. That first night, Taylor set his alarm every two hours “to check we weren’t racking up hundreds of thousands of pounds”. 

Sadly, despite the offer of a cheat code, DiCaprio never got in touch (“He was probably too concerned with climate change, the selfish bugger,” says McCourt), but …Rampage’s runaway success proved the team’s gaming chops and more interactive space exploration is planned.

Having recently teamed up with events company Silent Studios, The Line is also keen to do more live events, bringing like-minded individuals together and celebrating the craft of animation, which perhaps isn’t honoured as much as it should be.

“When we started out, everything we did was with pencils and paper,” explains Taylor. “Now it’s gone from something real and tangible, where the craft is evident, to being entirely digital where things can disappear at the click of a button.” Creating 3D sculptures of characters and showing development art at the project launch – as they did for Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit – “adds value, rather than simply sticking the film online,” says McCourt. 

Heading to a Hollywood ending?

Next up are two original TV series – Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit and Amaro & Walden’s Joyride, part of ETC’s move into original content production. Though everyone’s tight-lipped on details, apparently several Hollywood studios and “a major TV network” have shown interest. With such a bright future ahead, it seems no one’s drawing a line under The Line any time soon.