Interview: UTD - Let the Bodies Hit the Floor
The second episode of Outside the Lines: A Line Rider Podcast is here, and it’s with UTD, creator of LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR, which topped last month’s roundup. I thought publishing the first episode in article form came out really well, and some people seemed to prefer this format, so I think I’m going to keep publishing these here, in addition to on the podcast and on the Line Rider Review YouTube channel with subtitles. Enjoy!
AVA: Hello everyone, I’m Ava Hofmann, and this is Outside the Lines, a Line Rider podcast where I interview Line Rider creators and talk to them about the artistry behind their tracks.
Although he has been making things in Line Rider for much longer, UTD started posting tracks onto his current YouTube channel in 2020. Since then, he has been using his highly choreographic style to create unique and expressive Line Rider narratives. UTD’s work takes frequently-overlooked aspects of trackmaking, like offsled and video editing, and uses these elements to convey psychological and thematic information, such as the violent mindset of a serial killer in Cradles, or the experiences of an abuse victim in Silhouette. Heavily influenced by animation, UTD’s work prioritizes Line Rider as a kind of video art, over the conventional expectation that a track should be entirely in-engine, or a single continuous piece. As a result, UTD’s work frequently opens up new possibilities of expression in Line Rider, both technically and thematically.
Today, I’ll be interviewing UTD about his latest track, LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR. BODIES, set to the classic metal song, is a wild mosh pit of a track, featuring some of the best offsled movement Line Rider has to offer. Unafraid to veer into the absurdity of its premise, and fully committing to its thematic ideas, UTD has created one of the most aggressive, and aggressively joyous, tracks of the year. If you haven’t already, I’d really recommend you go see it. From its swarms of thrashing riders, to its layer-automated text, it’s chock full of surprising and entertaining visuals.
AVA: Great to have you, UTD.
UTD: Hello!
AVA: So, first off, in your own words, describe BODIES. Talk a little bit about it, and what you find special or interesting about it.
UTD: Um... well, BODIES is a fucking shitshow. [laughter] It’s basically a shitpost, that ended up being an unironic rush of adrenaline encapsulated into a Line Rider track.
AVA: Yeah, it started off as a shitpost and spiraled out from there, right?
UTD: Yeah. One day I joined the voice chat in the Line Rider Artists Collective, and I was looking through my track files, and I clicked on the track file named “Bodies”, and I was like, “Oh, I remember this.” I ended up showing it to the people in the voice chat, and they were like, “You’ve got to make this into a full track!” and I was like, “I guess I could do that.”
Initially the falling Boshes in the original would stay stationary, but I wanted to have the bodies flying everywhere, so I ended up changing the movement. The original movement is still available - I gave it to Bevibel before I changed it, so it should be archived. But from there, I was just like, “What kind of crazy movement can I do from this point onward?” I ended up taking a lot of the techniques that I did from my previous tracks, and implementing ideas around them. The bulk of my work before that point was largely experimental - like, “What are some new ideas I can test out in Line Rider? What hasn’t been done in Line Rider before?” When I was making BODIES, I was like, “Okay, I have all of these ideas, and I’ve tried running with them in previous tracks - how do I combine them together?”
In my previous track, Silhouette, I had wanted to expand upon the idea of creating a story in Line Rider, which is also what I’d tried to do previously with Cradles. In Cradles there was this whole racism subtext that went over everyone’s head and was way too subtle, so with Silhouette I kind of wanted to improve upon that, using all the techniques that I’d used in my tracks up to that point. It was very emotional, but it was also kind of experimental in its own right, because it had the whole post-production animation at the end. With BODIES, I wanted to establish an artistic voice in Line Rider, with elements from previous Line Rider tracks - crossfading, multi-rider repetitive movement that syncs jauntily to the beat, layer automation (from Silhouette), crayon lines representing energy (from With or Without You and Headlock) and the general feel from Headlock of being more of a weird video art thing than a Line Rider track - I wanted to use all of this as a backlog to make an extremely funny track, basically.
AVA: It really does feel like this synthesis of a lot of things that you’ve done previously into one very complete-feeling work. It’s interesting that it started out as a shitpost - I saw the original shitpost version, and the joke was that opening with the ton of riders hitting the ground at the first “FLOOOR!!!” [laughter] You kind of took that joke and expanded it outward, using all these things you’ve been practicing.
UTD: I think what makes BODIES special to me is that it starts out as a joke, and on first watch it it’s really funny, but then on subsequent rewatches it’s actually really energetic, and it’s like, “Holy shit, this is, like, unironically good!” Like, it’s not a Line Rider shitpost where the joke is just, “Do you recognize this meme? Well, here it is in Line Rider!” I guess that’s part of what makes the track funny - “Do you recognize this song from the late 2000s that’s kind of become a meme? Well, here it is in Line Rider!” But it’s also like, “Holy shit, this is actually kind of bonkers for a Line Rider track!” too.
AVA: You sort of take the joke seriously.
UTD: Yeah. It’s unironic in a way, too - I’m not being like, “Haha isn’t this so silly! Ironic detachment!” it’s like, “This is actually kind of fun!” That’s what makes the track special, at least to me. Other people might consider it like, “Ooh, the technical ability in this track is, like, wow, incredible.” [laughter] And yeah, I’m proud of the technical stuff that I did in this track, especially towards the end, when it panned into a quasi-static shot with all the riders hitting the walls, and the layer automated text - that took a lot of work.
AVA: The camera is not suited for that.
UTD: Yeah, and it required multiple recordings and post-production shenaniganery. I’m proud of that, but it’s also like, “Holy shit, that’s so fucking hype!” you know? [laughter]
AVA: I think this leads really well into a question about offsled. Dismounted Bosh is a state that has sort of been disregarded by track makers for a really long period of time, right?
UTD: Yeah
AVA: Like, offsled is even sort of associated with technical incompetence or a lose-state. And as you’ve been highlighting, for you, Bosh dismounting and remounting is this theme that you’ve been exploring over and over. Cradles, along with BODIES, are the two that are most obvious about that, along with Silhouette, and Headlock - where you have this huge dramatic dismount moment with the scribble clouds and the falling off the cliff. With BODIES, you’ve created one of the best and most technically proficient offsled tracks ever. So I’m interested in how and why you started exploring offsled movement in Line Rider.
UTD: That actually is an interesting question, because I’ve played Line Rider since I was a kid. I would make Line Rider tracks and show them to my mom, and she would be like, “Wow, this is cool,” and it would be, like, a fucking ripoff of TechDawg’s A Dawg’s Song. [laughter] One time, I showed my mom this track that I made when I was nine - it was, like, three minutes of Bosh being offsled and sledding very slowly on some maze corridor thing - and my mom was like, “Wow, I hated that. That sucked.” And I was like, “Well, fuck,” and I got really angry about it, and she was like, “It’s just criticism! Why don’t you take criticism?” I guess that moment, plus a lot of the community pressure to conform to a certain standard at the time, with quirk and with scenery, made me feel like I had to follow a specific rigid set of standards, in order to not only be accepted in the community, but also feel like I belong.
For years that demotivated me from ever really getting into Line Rider. I was always into Line Rider - at most, I stopped paying attention to it for two years - but I didn’t start seriously making Line Rider tracks until 2018. When I rediscovered Line Rider in 2016, I started familiarizing myself with all of these experimentalish tracks that were coming out - stuff that Apple was posting, like Rigamortis and Here, stuff like Daisies, which was a flatsled at a time that was extremely rare - and it was actually really good, probably one of my favorite tracks of the 2010s - there was stuff like… not The Gorge… the forest under the earth, which tried telling a story in Line Rider - that was actually really emotional, and it’s one of my favorite tracks of all time. But obviously the big one here is Ragdoll, because Ragdoll was an offsled track that disregarded the notion that Bosh has to stay on their sled, and also shut down that whole moment I had with my mom when I was nine, like, “Maybe I shouldn’t do offsled anymore,” - it was like, “I could probably do anything in Line Rider! It’s just, the reason a lot of possibilities in Line Rider haven’t been explored yet, is because it’s often been discouraged to do so in favor of meeting the standard.”
So, in 2018, when I started familiarizing myself more with Line Rider Advanced, which offered a lot more possibilities than Beta 2 - people who started Line Rider after Line Rider Advanced released kind of forget how completely horrible Beta 2 was [laughter] - in terms of workflow and actually executing tricks. Line Rider Advanced made it possible for me to do things that I wasn’t able to do before. The first track I made with LRA was this condensed quirk track that was all red lines, and I just did it because I could now, with playback scrubbing. Then I made Let Go in 2018, that was this giant crayon canvas that Bosh would recycle through multiple times. I would have never been able to do that in Beta 2 - to recycle in Beta 2, I would have to place a flag, edit the line, and then go back to the start of the track to see if it was edited in any way. Unlike LRA, where I can just do lifelock, adjust the line a little, and then see how the rider gets affected immediately, and I don’t have to waste days starting the track over, trying to see if it recycles through. So, I’ve always approached LRA - and then eventually Linerider.com - because .com would go on to have more features that would be interesting to experiment with - like, “What can I do that hasn’t really been done, or that I haven’t been able to do with Line Rider, that I can do now with the advanced technology and tools?”
So in 2020 I made the track With or Without You, that was a standard slow burn track, but I had this great idea for an ending with slow motion that ended up revolutionizing playback speed.
AVA: Yeah, that track is why the time remapping feature exists on .com now.
UTD: And then shortly after With or Without You, on April Fools, I released Run, which was the first time I was like, “Okay, let’s really make offsled a feature in a track.” At first I was like, “I’m just going to release this as a joke for April Fools,” because the concept was really esoteric and niche - “What if Bosh would go offsled, and start recycling through parts of a track they’ve sledded through, in sync to the music, for the entirety of the song?” I found that to be an interesting concept, but at the time I was still like, “Does this work? Is this proper offsled? I don’t know.” So it was better to ironically detach, and just consider it an April Fool’s track, even though I personally find the track really good.
Both of those led up to Cradles, because after Run came out the remounting feature got introduced, and that allowed for a lot more possibilities with offsled movement. That combined with playback speed, and other ideas I was tinkering with at the time, like combining post-production with the actual track - because post-production and Line Rider up until that point was just like, “You want a flashy intro? Just edit that in post-production,” and it’d be like, “Alpha Leonis presents: Resurgence! [vocalizing] “Duh, da-da-duh-duh, space theme!!!” [laughter] and then the actual track plays.
AVA: And then that video editing is, like, isolated.
UTD: Yeah - it’s completely isolated from the track. “What if post-production was part of the track?” was the mentality I had when approaching Cradles. All that led up to Cradles, along with other tracks I was looking at at the time, like Omniverse II. Eventually, that led to Headlock, which I was not satisfied with at first - I thought it was pretty low quality - but it was also like, “I want to experiment more - I should experiment more with offsled.” And that track ended up with the best parts of it being the scribble section, where the rider is offsled and bouncing from scribble to scribble on beat, right?
AVA: Yeah.
UTD: And with the large Bosh coming in...
AVA: Cross-faded Bosh face.
UTD: Yeah. And so I guess all of these mounting expectations I had on myself, and what people expected out of me, and what I wanted to do, culminated in Silhouette, which was a very venty track where I expressed my fears that maybe one day Line Rider would be ruined for me, the same way other things in other communities have been ruined for me. That track was very much a healing process.
When I started working on BODIES, I was once again like, “This is just a funny shitpost track.” And then people wanted me to make it more, and when I started making it more, I was like, “This isn’t just a funny shitpost track, this can actually be really fucking good!” And then I ended up taking it more seriously than a lot of other projects, that I would have otherwise deemed to be stuff that would really impress people. A lot of things happened during the making of it, but when I released it, I was like, “Holy crap, I’m completely satisfied with this!”
Well, actually the release date was interesting, because I pulled an all-nighter on the track, before realizing that I had to go to a musical on the same day, so I finished the track, published it to YouTube, and then went to the musical, and I stayed up for 36 hours or something.
AVA: Oh my god.
UTD: I was just completely wrecked by the end of that day. It was horrible. [laughter]
AVA: 36 hours, ugh...
UTD: But when I woke up the next day and saw all the responses, I was just, like, “You know? This actually is pretty good! And this would be what quirkers would consider technically proficient - technically innovative in some way.” But I didn’t view it as that, I viewed it as like, “This is a funny track that I made, that’s also really energetic and aggressive.”
And I guess to answer what attracts me to offsled - it’s that you can have this technically proficient nature to Line Rider, but you can also have a whole other level of accessibility to it that you wouldn’t otherwise get from a regular quirk track. When you watch BODIES, the movement doesn’t feel like a Line Rider track - at times, it almost feels like a video animation that just happens to use Bosh as the character being animated.
AVA: Yeah - and this is a good way to lead into another question, related to that energetic movement that is very accessible. I’ve noticed that people who aren’t into Line Rider as much - I’ve shown them BODIES and they really liked it. I think an aspect of that, and something that I find really special in BODIES, is the way that you’re capturing a very specific form of dance, and that’s the mosh pit. Obviously, capturing the energy of the mosh pit works really well with Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, a song about the camaraderie of the mosh pit, right?
UTD: Yeah.
AVA: The connection between Line Rider and dance has been discussed elsewhere, but in BODIES, and your other tracks, it feels like you’re creating specific choreography for your riders. And this choreography isn’t dance choreography per se, it’s almost theater choreography, or storytelling choreography, like the sledders attacking each other in Cradles. The moshing in BODIES is more literally dance, but there’s also a narrative of Bosh discovering the mosh pit in that track, right?
UTD: Yeah.
AVA: So, how are you thinking about the relationship between movement and storytelling in your tracks?
UTD: One thing that I think is really important is the usage of invisible layers. This is what I mean by a different level of accessibility, because a lot of quirk tracks have a very specific aesthetic, but appear very esoteric to most people - because the main focus is the lines, and how they connect to and pull Bosh. But if you’re an average person watching a Line Rider video, you’re gonna see a bunch of lines, and then Bosh just wiggling around. So I choreograph my riders with the intention that I am going to make the lines invisible, and that Bosh is going to be the center and forefront. If you were to look at BODIES with the invisible lines on, it would look like complete nonsense. There would be lines over everything, and more focus would be on the lines than on Bosh. But, because the lines are invisible, all the focus is on Bosh’s movement, and then you see, “Oh, they’re actually doing a specific dance.”
It’s a lot like animation. I have experience in animation, and I’ve had my own creations that I’ve made entire stories about, but when you want to make a story, you gotta decide, like, “What’s the plot? Who are the characters?” A large part of animation is conveying all that information through the movement, so when I’m making a Line Rider track where the movement is carrying the story, I often employ the same techniques. Like, “How do I express a certain thing like I would in animation? What kind of movement would move the plot along, or add to the narrative?” But it’s also a little different, because it’s not a full-fledged cartoon, right? It’s still a Line Rider track - so, “What would be a cool music visualization? What would draw out the most emotion from the movement?” Bosh doesn’t really have any facial expressions, so you can’t have Bosh smile, or be scared, and show that through his face - you have to show that through the movement. Which is kind of encouraged in animation, when it comes to learning movement, or learning how to convey across emotion in a character, but you have to apply that knowledge through the lens of a different technical way of doing things, like Line Rider.
So the way I consider movement and storytelling is, movement is just another way of moving the story along. And there are other tricks I can use to expand upon the narrative, like post-production, or even just a general concept that has been tossed around in the Line Rider community and has gained a certain cultural connotation, that I can subvert, or use to signal, “Hey, this reminds you of this, right? Well, you know how that made you feel - the general emotions that are in that track are now being transferred here.” This is called reification - using reification to convey across specific emotions that would be hard to do if you were to go off of nothing, culturally. This is what I did in Where a Silhouette Once Walked - I used the connotations that where a garden once grew had, with me and some of the Line Rider community, and subverted it to tell a story. It’s similar to how movie directors have codified their own filmmaking language, when it comes to stuff like lighting, or specific motifs that are used constantly throughout film and pop culture, and it’s very interesting to cultivate that in a niche community and niche art form like Line Rider. So movement is just another part of the toolkit when it comes to making stories.
AVA: I think it’s really interesting that your first principle is that you want to tell a story. Your tracks are often about telling direct stories - as you’re highlighting, they have characters and plot beats. You’re thinking, “How does this movement characterize Bosh? How does it move the plot along?” and this is still pretty unusual for Line Rider. It’s changing recently, but even in narrative tracks the narrative tends to be more abstract, and oftentimes it shies away from distinct characters and characterizations, and distinct plots, right?
UTD: Yeah.
AVA: Not many other people are making stories where, like, Bosh is a serial killer. And it has put you at the forefront of a certain wave of narrative exploration in Line Rider. What is drawing you to Line Rider as a storytelling medium?
UTD: For one thing, I talked earlier about how I felt like I had to meet up to this rigid standard in the past, when it comes to what’s expected out of a Line Rider track, and this feeling is not uncommon for things I’m interested in. The last time I made an animation was Silhouette, and that was the first time in five years. Animation is very hard to do, and it is very inaccessible to me, as a neurodivergent person who has trouble telling stories in a way that neurotypical people would connect to. It is a very cutthroat industry, especially the mainstream animation industry, and a lot of it is heavily in favor of neurotypical, well-off people, who have a certain mindset when it comes to grinding animation - being on the grindset [laughter] - thinking that the value of animation comes from how hard it is. There is a lot of that elitism in animation, especially in online circles. One of the most famous stories of animation is with Richard Williams and The Thief and The Cobbler, which was a film that they spent like 25 years working on. It had been picked up and funded by a studio, the movie didn’t make its deadline, the studio - Miramax - ended up releasing their own, like, bootleg version of the movie, and it bombed completely. But there is a Recobbled Cut online that shows a lot of the original animation that was intended for the movie, and the movie... for the most part, it sucks! [laughter] It’s extremely slow paced, the animation itself is more focused on the fact that it’s all in ones, and it’s extremely smooth, but without having any weight, and as a result the slapstick feels extremely unsatisfying, and the story is just nothing, for the most part, and has a lot of problematic aspects to it...
AVA: Yeah...
UTD: But here’s the thing - most people will look at that and go like, “Wow, this is a triumph! 25 years! All that hard work! That’s how you know it’s good!” And that’s the mindset most people have with animation - “This must have taken so much effort, that must mean it’s valuable.” And for the longest time, that’s the value people attributed to Line Rider, right? People would make comments like, “Wow, this must have taken you so long! This must mean it’s, like… That’s how I attribute value to this track - it must have taken years to do!” But, obviously, how hard something is is not what makes an art medium special, right? It’s the ability to tell stories, and the ability to connect to other people. But this whole - Rabid calls it “gamification”, which is a pretty good term to describe what happens to a lot of industries under capitalism in general - people associate hard work with value, instead of personal connection, or the emotion that they felt.
I guess what draws me to Line Rider is that it’s a new art form, so it’s a way to break away from that. People don’t look at BODIES and think, “Wow, this must have taken so long to make!” It took two months to make, but that’s not what people like about it - what people like about it is, like, “Holy shit, this is fucking bonkers! This is unhinged!” [laughter] The way the energy is captured in the song is the appeal of it, and that’s the value people attribute to it. And that’s what I want! I want people to look at art, not from the perspective of how hard it was to do, or how long it took to do, but what it is, and what it means to them.
And also, what draws Line Rider, as a storytelling medium, to me, is that it’s a chance to cultivate a neurodivergent art medium. Because a lot of autism representation is either completely obscured - as in it’s never really confirmed - or, like, straight-up horrible. There’s not really a lot of good autism representation - and not only that, there’s not really a lot of avenues where autistic people like myself can go to, to feel fulfilled partaking in an art medium. Oftentimes it can be a multitude of factors - there’s a disconnect between us and the community, and there’s a disconnect in the actual process of making the art, and there’s a disconnect between the cultural expectations associated with a certain art medium and what you want to personally see out of it. There’s not really a lot of avenues to express myself in a neurodivergent way, and Line Rider is one of the rare art mediums where there is no disconnect between me and the community.
And also, it’s really fun and fulfilling for me to do, personally - not only because it’s something that I’ve been doing since childhood, that’s been near to my heart for pretty much all my life, but also because of the way it combines gaming aspects, like keeping Bosh on a sled, or synchronizing movement through drawing lines and getting a specific result - but all of those gameplay aspects add up to, like, a story, or a work of art. Obviously video games are art - there’s plenty of great art that has been made through video games, but in this specific way, the art in question is a music visualizer, or something that can be enjoyed independent of actually playing it, but that you can still get into from a gaming aspect if you want to. And I just find that really fucking cool! And I want to expand upon that, I want to grow it - not in a way that’s like, more people are aware about it, or it gets more popular, but more like I want to grow the cultural backbone of this community, and offer more possibilities for the art medium.
And if I can do that, if I can help cultivate an art medium that does appeal to neurodivergent people - and hopefully, in the future, more marginalized groups of people - that would be really cool! I think that would make the world a better place, for a lot of people who otherwise would not feel represented by a lot of things that are more mainstream, when it comes to animation or just media in general. And to be fair, that is improving in some aspects - when it comes to neurodivergent representation, with The Owl House, Luz is a neurodivergent character who has ADHD. So representation is improving in a lot of aspects - but, there’s representation, and then there’s something you can go to - something you can feel like you belong in, that has a community cultivated specifically for you. And I feel like a lot of neurotypical people have that, and a lot of neurodivergent people don’t. So, I think by making Line Rider, in part, at least, a neurodivergent art medium for people to explore, it would help me specifically, but it would also help others feel like they are valued, and that they matter, and that they are heard, at least by someone. So, that’s what draws me to Line Rider as a way to tell stories.
AVA: In that you were talking a little bit about pushing the narrative possibilities of Line Rider forward. And you’ve been doing that in a variety of ways - we’ve talked about the movement, and the way you approach storytelling, but another thing that’s really consistent throughout all of the work on your YouTube channel is video editing. BODIES is only a little bit edited - there’s a flashback scene, some editing involving line color, and a few very subtle cuts - and yet, the choice to edit the actual track visuals at all is still very rare in Line Rider. For a long time, tracks were generally thought of as single, continuous, unedited works - the idea that you could download the track and watch it play out in Line Rider if you wanted to, at least conceptually. Only recently have Line Rider creators been really exploring the use of video editing, and you’ve been at the forefront of that push. There are the subtler edits in BODIES, but also some extreme editing choices, like the slow motion in With or Without You, as well as the cut into a long animated sequence in Silhouette. You’ve previously called these kinds of video-edited Line Rider works “non-tracks”, and you’ve repeatedly emphasized the artistic value of these non-tracks for their ability to expand Line Rider’s expressive capabilities. How did you start adding video editing to your work, and how do you personally go about combining Line Rider with video art?
UTD: Well, before Line Rider, I was part of a community - that I don’t really want to get into, or ever associate with again - but I bring it up because in that community I learned how to video edit - with Movie Maker at first, and then eventually Sony Vegas. I learned video editing tricks, and how to make a standard YouTube video, and when I left that community and started getting more into Line Rider, I started thinking, “I have all these video editing tools at my disposal, but I don’t really have any video essay I want to do, or want to make a standard YouTube video.” At the time, I didn’t really want to make any more YouTube videos, honestly - I just wanted to focus on my job, but that changed when COVID hit and I couldn’t focus on my job. So at first I just sprinkled in a little bit of video editing, and that was With or Without You - and also Run, because in Run I would just speed up or slow down the footage whenever it would sync. But Cradles was the turning point, because it was like, “I have all these tools at my disposal, and Line Rider does have this whole history when it comes to post-production,” - you kind of touched on this in Anemoia 2 with introductions and stuff - “so, what if I took all these techniques that I’ve learned with video editing, and combined them with Line Rider?” because I wanted to feel like it was useful for something. But once I did, it did expand the expressive possibilities with Line Rider.
So, the way I go about conceptualizing a Line Rider track is, if I listen to a song and I want to make a Line Rider track to it, I’ll start thinking of strong narrative ideas that the song brings out of me, or that I associate with certain lyrics. These will generally be isolated ideas at specific parts of the song, and when I actually start making the track - because this is how it worked for BODIES - I’m just like, “Okay, now what do I do for this part? How do I connect it? How do I make this complete?” I guess a large part of post-production is just knowing that that possibility is there - that it is something I can resort to - something convenient, something I have experience in, and something that’s fun to do, if I want to convey across a specific narrative element. So, it’s just taking stuff that I do have skill in, and applying it in a way where I can express myself fully.
I definitely am not the first to do this - Dangerous Cargo, and even tracks from back in the day - like Shadoninja’s Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1, and even TechDawg experimented with it in some UnBound releases. But it hasn’t been generally accepted as a major part of the Line Rider community, because people were like, “Okay, the major parts are scenery, or you’re a quirker, or you’re a noob.” [laughter]
AVA: Right.
UTD: This is something I alluded to in my Cradles making-of video, but the main reason why I push video editing, and non-tracks in general, is because I want people to know that there’s more ways to approach Line Rider - you can employ video editing, or you can make a multimedia project, like Silhouette - a Line Rider track that leads into an animation. It doesn’t have to be a binary of quirk, and scenery, and that’s it - there are an infinite amount of ways to approach Line Rider, and post-production, non-tracks, and implementing video editing is just one of them - one that I find to be personally very fun and fulfilling.
AVA: For a lot of the things we’ve been talking about, 2020 was a really important year in this shift. I have watched some of your older 2018 tracks that are preserved on the Line Rider Archive, and these older tracks are definitely more… conventional, than With or Without You and after, and it makes a lot of sense why With or Without You is sort of the first video on your current YouTube channel. It seems to be, in some sense, a departure from your previous work. What do you think prompted this change in your style?
UTD: So it was fun at first, exploring Line Rider Advanced and all the possibilities I could never do as a child - the quirk, all these weird ideas that I would want to implement in Line Rider - like, “Wow, I can finally do all this now!” But after a while it was like, “Okay, now what?” After a while, making conventional tracks just got… kind of boring? With or Without You is still a mostly conventional track outside of the ending - but that took several months to make, and a large part of it was just, “Okay, I’m gonna draw these squiggly lines throughout the entire thing, and I’m just gonna have to keep drawing more and more of them as the rider speeds up with the song,” and it’s just like, “I want to do something more with the medium.” Line Rider, after a while, became, like, “What kind of funny challenges can I conceptualize and try to beat in some ways?” Like, just a random challenge, like, “Can I have a track that Bosh rides, that I could then get him to recycle, on beat to the music, offsled?” and that was basically Run.
But, at the same time, I wanted it to be more than that, especially after Omniverse II released - that was the moment where I was like, “I know Line Rider can be more - the potential is right there, Omniverse II showed that - but how do I realize it?” And that culminated in Cradles, which really was the turning point - because that track took two weeks to make, and when it released it kind of blew up. And it wasn’t just me - the wider Line Rider community as a whole was becoming extremely experimental, and a lot of innovation was going on around the same time. Like, two days later The Devourer of Gods released, that kind of killed quirk [laughter] - because most quirkers regard it as the best quirk track, and it uses entirely invincibility mods, and the whole gamification mindset that a lot of quirk was rooted in back then, like, “You have to have Bosh be onsled, and you can’t use any hacks!” - it was just like, “No. Who cares anymore!” And also, around the same time, a good chunk of the Geometry Dash community was getting into Line Rider, and this would lead to tracks like You Are the Sunset, and Freaks, which would go on to start your Line Rider career, as you’ve talked about. And even earlier on in that year, there were tracks like I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, that was like the main turning point when it came to storytelling in Line Rider in general - even though, at the time, I didn’t get it? I feel bad saying that, but at the time I did not understand what story was trying to be said - I didn’t really see it. And then Bevibel’s video essay came out, and I was like, “Wow, that really is very nuanced,” but for two years I had been like, “I don’t get it.” [laughter] I didn’t even mention it in my making-of-Cradles video when talking about tracks that had a story, because I was like, ”Is there a story here? Am I not getting something?” [laughter] That track is still great, for the record - no shade to that track, I really love that track.
AVA: It’s willfully subtle, right? It’s supposed to kind of be hard to get.
UTD: Yeah. That’s something that Bevibel really went into in their video essay. But that track was also really important, because it got people to think what the emotional power of Line Rider could be.
So all of this, combined with my own exploration of what I want out of Line Rider and my own style, led up to me changing my style over time, and changing what I prioritized in Line Rider the most. And I guess, since Cradles, since 2020, I’ve just been diving deep into it. It’s not like, “This is something cool I could try - let’s try it, and then let’s do another challenge,” like a lot of my tracks from 2018, up to even 2020, with some of the earlier tracks on my channel. And it’s really cool, because it feels like I’m building something - I’m building this certain part of the community, I’m building this narrative voice for myself, I’m building this atmosphere throughout all of my tracks. Because when you watch through all of my tracks, it flows into one mood after the other - and all of my tracks so far have been very consistent in terms of what techniques I use, and how that makes me stand apart, and how that makes my storytelling stand apart. And that feeling is just really cool. It’s much more fulfilling to me than making a standard conventional track.
It can sometimes border a little bit into, like, “I want to one-up myself.” There is that expectation, like, “I’m gonna make the next Cradles,” because that was what happened with Silhouette at first, like, “Oh, this is gonna be the next Cradles, it’s gonna be even better, it’s gonna be my magnum opus!” So there is always that kind of expectation that eventually leads into burnout, and that I have to divert away from, or else I will completely burn myself out, which is what I did with Silhouette. But making non-tracks, for me, isn’t just an avenue to one-up myself, but a way to get more fulfillment out of Line Rider. I think there’s an important distinction to make between not being prolific because you want to make something that you are personally proud of, and not being prolific because you’re burning yourself out, because you want to one-up your previous project.
AVA: Yeah burnout in Line Rider is an issue, for sure - you mentioned I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, and Bevibel talks about that in that video essay. And speaking of other tracks, you’ve mentioned other tracks and Line Rider creators that have been influencing your work - I’m interested to hear about how your influences have affected the tracks that you’ve made.
UTD: I mean, it really depends on what I’m taking influence from. Sometimes a track will have a certain idea that I don’t think capitalizes on it in the way that I would want it to - not that it did a bad job at executing the idea, but it’s like, “This idea would be really cool for this other concept, and I would want to take advantage of that to express this other idea.” In most situations - sometimes I do the exact opposite to convey across a point. This is what I did with Silhouette - one of the anti-inspirations for Silhouette was You Are the Sunset, which is most well-known for having movement convey across a story - like, having this rough, un-kiltered movement convey across these very powerful emotions - and for the beginning part of Silhouette, I wanted this extremely smooth movement that didn’t really convey across any emotional power, and the attempts at doing so, like with kramuals, would just kind of fall flat. So I kind of modeled the beginning of Silhouette’s movement as the opposite of what You Are the Sunset did with its movement, to convey across a sense of nothingness, or a sense of emptiness.
And then there’s influences where I literally take the entire track and re-contextualize it, like what I did for where a garden once grew. where a garden once grew specifically is a track that helped me through an existential crisis I was going through in 2021, because the idea that all things fade, and eventually your life, and even the knowledge of your existence, will fade away from collective consciousness, is something that would actually keep me up. Like, I would not be able to sleep some nights, because I was constantly worrying about that. And when I released Silhouette, I was like, “Okay, I got this track out there,” and then where a garden once grew came back into my mind, like, “This thing is gonna fade away eventually.” And when that thought came across my mind, it was the first time it was like, “That’s not a bad thing. I want this trauma to eventually fade away, or become less severe over time.” That was a breakthrough for me, in terms of dealing with my existential crisis, because the idea that all things fade wasn’t a bad idea inherently - it was a neutral idea - and I wanted to express that in some way. I made Where a Silhouette Once Walked, and I felt released, like a burden was lifted off my shoulders. Because for pretty much all of my life, there was this idea that, “I have to be famous, I have to be successful,” because that’s what capitalism and the American dream kind of brings up on you - you have to be successful, monetarily and socially and not just successful - you have to be famous, you have to have your name known everywhere - that’s the pressure that society at large pushes onto you. And like, the realization that, “No, I don’t have to be this. In fact, it’s preferable that my story is not constantly in the spotlight, and that I can move on from extremely traumatic events, and that I can carve out a life for myself - not for the sake of any legacy or fan base that I want to attract - I can just live my life for the sake of living it, and associate with the people I want to associate with, and have the experiences I want to experience.” That idea was, unfortunately, completely foreign to me for most of my life, and once I realized it, life didn’t seem so scary anymore. I mean, obviously, there’s still a lot of scary aspects about the world today, but on an existential level, it’s not as scary. It’s kind of beautiful, in a sense. You know what I mean?
AVA: Yeah, I do.
UTD: So, the influences for tracks I make are just kind of an extension of what I’m feeling, for the most part. And sometimes what I feel from a track will be moderate, and sometimes what I feel from a track will impact my life in an extremely positive way that I would have never anticipated - especially as a kid - coming from a Line Rider track. Like, “A Line Rider track positively impacting my life? How?!” and it’s like, “Because Line Rider is an art medium, and Line Rider has cultivated this community.” And the fact that it can affect me in this way, the fact that it has that potential - if I can realize that potential even further, and if the rest of the community can realize that potential further, that would be amazing.
AVA: With BODIES, now that it’s out in the world, how are you feeling about it? How do you make sense of it, as this thing that you’ve made?
UTD: The thing about things I make - this is something I decided for myself two years ago, when I was starting to really shift my Line Rider style, and starting to really get primarily into Line Rider - for the years before 2020, a lot of the videos I made were videos that I would go on to regret, that I would go on to repress, that I would not want any more association with, that I would not even want to watch anymore. And I hated it! I hated that the stuff I was doing was not something I would want to come back to, because it was too painful to do so. So, come 2020, I was like, “I’m done. I’m not pumping out videos for the sake of someone else, or for the validation of a community. I want to make videos that I will want to watch years down the line - that aren’t going to be painful to remember.”
And when I decided that, Line Rider became much more appealing to me, because Line Rider is a creative art medium, and it does have that evergreen quality to it - it’s something that you can watch years down the line. Well, tracks eventually get dated over time, because of better techniques, and better tools, and better tracks that come along, that take previous tracks and do them better, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely obsolete - you can watch Line Rider tracks from 2008 - scenery tracks - that still are great videos to watch, because even if the techniques, or the way that Line Rider is nowadays, is completely different from how it was back then, it still stands up on its own. And that quality is what I really strive for when it comes to making my videos.
So, when it comes to how I make sense of BODIES after it’s released, it’s the same as with all of my tracks - it’s something I can watch, that will be there years down the line, that I can be proud of, still to this day - the same way I’m still proud of Cradles, of all my tracks, really - even the tracks that people overlook, like Fix You. Fix You was my first attempt at emotional storytelling in Line Rider, and I experimented with a lot of different ideas. That track is often overlooked because a lot of the ideas weren’t executed that well, to some people - like, people would find it too minimalist, or people would think that certain aspects of it were a bit cheesy. But I’m still proud of that track. It may not be my best track, but I made it, and I tried it, and it led to works in the future that I am especially proud of, like Silhouette, and that’s not something I would want to shove under the rug!
I make these tracks for myself! Like, I didn’t even look at the responses to Silhouette for the first two months, mostly because of anxiety - because that was a very personal track, and I didn’t want to read something like, “Wow, this is shit! I don’t get it! What the fuck is this bullshit?! You put animation in Line Rider track?!” [laughter] I didn’t want to read something like that - I was scared of reading something like that. And eventually I got the confidence to read it, but I made that track for myself first and foremost, because it felt like something I had to make, and I’m still incredibly proud of it. And likewise, I’m still incredibly proud of BODIES - I’m proud of all the work that I put into it, and I’m especially proud of the story behind it. Because, Silhouette was a way of transferring all the feelings and fears and anxiety that I had at the time onto the creative process of making that track - the idea that it’s not perfect enough, nobody will get it, nobody will like it, and eventually I’m going to regret everything - transferring all those feelings into that vent of a track. That whole story is interesting to me - and likewise with BODIES.
What happened in the middle of BODIES - and I think I do want to talk about this publicly now - is that I found out that I was plural - that I had multiple personalities, which is something that I was not aware of until midway through making BODIES. I started recognizing that my headmate was talking to me, and that it was a headmate talking to me, and not just my conscience or something. And through making BODIES, I would go on to develop an understanding of my headmates, and a greater understanding of myself. And I was able to finish BODIES much quicker than I would have otherwise, had I been on my own - had I not had anyone to support me, or be there for me, when working on the track - not in a friend-support way, but in a material way - like, reminding me to do something with the track, to continue working on it - for myself, because that’s what I wanted to do. The headmates are Infinity and Beyond, who I give special thanks to at the end of the track, because without them I don’t think the track would even be released now. Right now I’m in a bit of a tough situation, and the past two weeks have just been me trying to confront that, knowing that I’m now plural, and that there are other people who rely on me, as I rely on them, and trying to be a functional system of people, right?
AVA: Yeah, totally.
UTD: And it’s difficult, but I’m glad I made BODIES, because not only is it, as you said in the intro, “aggressively joyous” - a very joyous track about mosh pitting - about Bosh pitting [laughter] - and being one with the mosh pit - it’s also a liberating experience for me personally, to discover myself and move forward, when it comes to how I see myself, and how I want others to see me. It was a way for me to move forward, in terms of, like, a healthy way to function in life. There’s a pathway to it, and BODIES was, like, a joyous kind of vision of what could be.
So, yeah - there’s a lot I make out of BODIES, the same way there’s a lot I make out of all of my tracks, really - and different tracks mean different things to me, because they’re all different experiences, at the end of the day. And I think that’s what makes art so gratifying to me personally - the experiences that I have with making art, and the stories I associate with the art that I make, and what it means to me, personally -that it might not mean to anyone else, only to me specifically. Like, probably nobody is going to look at BODIES and think, “Oh yeah, this is about UTD’s self-discovery with plurality,” I mean, maybe now that I’ve talked about it, but nobody’s gonna look at it, isolated, and think that - that’ll be only my interpretation - but it’s something special to me, and it’s nice to have that.
AVA: Absolutely. What do you hope for, from the future, either in Line Rider, or in life, or in both?
UTD: Well, when it comes to Line Rider, I just hope it continues going down the direction it’s going down right now. Because the Line Rider community, especially in the past couple of months, has become extremely experimental, and more focused on the storytelling capacities of Line Rider, and the emotional capacity of Line Rider. Like, I’ve been really digging a lot of Instantflare’s newest stuff, especially their exploration into dreamscapes and nightmares with Fever Dream and I wish I could - and, you know, tracks like Mount Eerie - this completely experimental, yet emotional, and, I guess, exciting way of looking at things in this burgeoning new art medium. It’s like, “Yes! I want to see more of that! That shit’s cool!” Obviously, people can do whatever they want in Line Rider - if they want to do quirk or scenery, I’m not going to be like, “You can’t do that! It’s outdated! You gotta get with the times!” I will always encourage people to do whatever they want with Line Rider - unless it’s like actively harmful, obviously. But I want more accessibility with Line Rider.
And I want the exact same thing for a lot of other niche online communities, that are not as mature as Line Rider, and are still stuck in the whole gamification mindset that a lot of the early Line Rider community was stuck in, that kneecapped a lot of the potential growth, and a lot of the potential accessibility, that Line Rider could have had back then. There’s a lot of niche online communities that fall into the trap of, “There’s this objective standard, and we’re going to impose it on everyone, and if you don’t do this, you’re not valued in this community.” The most prominent example is Geometry Dash - I’ve never played Geometry Dash, but I’ve definitely been aware of communities like it, with its whole rating system, and how levels are judged extremely harshly, and how people get harassment just for making a level they don’t like, because they view art as an objective kind of thing, instead of something that is more subjective, and as a result, they harshly impose what they consider “common sense standards” onto others, who don’t view Geometry Dash the way that they do. That’s extremely common in a lot of niche online communities, that are specifically gamer-centric - that are populated by a lot of “bored teenagers”, as Rabid described in their gamification video. So I hope that gamification mindset - objectifying art, in a way - just one day... goes extinct? [laughter] I mean, obviously that mindset will never go away - but, like, stop being as prominent - where the norm is more like what Line Rider is doing right now - communities that are more welcoming and accepting of novel ideas, and don’t judge something based on how hard it was to work on, or the technical ability of the creator, but more on how it makes them feel, personally, and how they can add more accessibility to other people who might not otherwise be welcomed in the community.
And when it comes to my life, I just kind of hope to get out of the situation I’m in right now, honestly. But, like, long term, when it comes to what I want to do with my life, at this point in time I am 21, and… I have no fucking idea what I want to do with my life. I have plenty of avenues to go down, there are plenty of possibilities - but when it comes to, like, “What’s the main thing you want to do?” I don’t have an answer, and I honestly don’t think there is a main thing I want to do, other than just live life. Sometimes I want to do one thing, sometimes I want to do another thing. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that inherently - it’s just that, under capitalism, it’s like, “You have to have this one thing, that you do all your life, and then you retire. That’s how it works.” But that sounds incredibly debilitating to think about - like, “Just one thing? That’s it?” I have lots of interests - there are lots of things I want to do. So I guess the plan for my life as a whole is that I have no plan. The main thing I want out of my life, is to feel like I’ve lived a life that I can be proud of, and Line Rider just feels like one more step to achieving that.
And I guess I hope that one day, I can feel free to talk about all of my interests, and all of my hyperfixations, with, like, a regular person, and I don’t have to feel weird about doing so - because of how hyperfixations have been viewed by other people throughout most of my life. Like, “This is weird - nobody will get it, or nobody will even know about it.” That feeling has permeated throughout most of my life - people won’t take my hyperfixation seriously. They’re like, ”Who gives a shit, this is just silly.” And I just want to get to a point one day, where I don’t have to feel like that’s the case whenever I talk about something like Line Rider, or any of the other interests that I have. And I also want to make it so that I don’t have to worry about whether or not I want to introduce people to the community around a lot of the interests that I have. Sometimes I’ll worry about whether or not people will get my hyperfixation, and sometimes I’ll worry, “Oh shit, the community around this kind of thing sucks, and I hate it, and I don’t want anyone to join the community.”
I guess that’s the main thing that I would want - out of Line Rider, out of my life - to be free to express myself without it being traumatic. I want to feel free to express myself in a way where I can feel like I am worth something. And I guess that’s basically it. Like, what else do you want out of life, really? I mean, aside from the world not being a piece of shit. [laughter] You know what I mean.
This interview was conducted on August 11, 2022. It has been edited for concision and clarity.
Thanks for reading!
Outside the Lines: A Line Rider Podcast
Line Rider Review YouTube Channel
Support the Line Rider Artists Collective on Ko-Fi
Apply to Join the Line Rider Artists Collective