Week 4: Related Works

By Holland Kerr

 

Birds is a 2019 music video for Imagine Dragons, animated by Zach Wong. It features a mother and daughter, able to fly as a metaphor for their Native American heritage, dealing with the themes of uniqueness, racism and family. 

    Flight in the short is not utilised for it’s aesthetically pleasing arcs and movements. Flying scenes show off wings as stable objects, while the characters glide across the screen. Emphasis isn’t put on wings as literal moving tools, but as symbols.the protagonists ability to fly ties her to her mother, as goes the necklace of a winged totem she wears around her neck. 

    Being able to set vital emotional sequences in the sky opens up an animator's access to extremely various styles of lighting and character blocking, and this is utilised 3 times in the work. 

 

Journey is a 3D game by Thatgamecompany and Santa Monica Studio, directed by Jenova Chen, with Art direction by Matt Nava and Aaron Jessie. It is about a nameless character in the deserts of a destroyed kingdom, gaining the ability to fly by freeing flying animals and discovering statues and hieroglyphs which teach the player how the civilisation you explore was destroyed, as you reach the top of a mountain. 

While working on my first weekly flying piece, the jellyfish child, I found myself thinking of Journey, back when I played it in around 2018. The more I look back on it, the more elements of the game's character, light and movement design I see in my own work. It unconsciously influenced my artistic decisions in the first few weeks of the semester, certainly. 

The flying mechanic, the theme of cooperation with nature and the narrative of the destroyed civilisation are all integrated together into a labour and reward system, where the player frees the captured cloth animals from cages, they lengthen your ability to sustain flight, and then lead you toward the rewards and story beats of each level. 

There isn’t a much nonlinear/choice driven exploration within the game, but the environments are huge and awe inspiring, giving the player engaging spaces to move around in. Flying is a mechanic built to be contrasted with walking. Walking takes about 3 times as long as flying and flying is interconnected with animal bonding, glowing, flowing movement and achieving the goals of each area. When at the apex of the story, the flying mechanic is taken away, the laboured slowness of the walking is emphasised both with animation and sound. 

The beauty of the flying animations is what inspired be to take up unity and explore making a 3D flight simulation as my second project.

 

Sky, also from Thatgamecompany and director Jenova Chen, with art direction by Yui Tanabe and Jacky Ke Jiang, is a 2019 mobile game. It uses many of the same mechanics of flight, but with key differences, and uses multi player cooperation to explore 3D spaces. The goal of the game is to move around an open world setting listening to ghosts about their past lives. Some critics have referred to Sky as an unofficial Journey Sequel. 

Playing through Sky I noted some key differences in how flying felt. emphasis is put on the players' choices, as the sequences which make up the levels can be explored in any order. Flying lasts considerably longer, and the Magical animals one absorbs in order to fly don’t need to be earned and are available everywhere, movement is less of a reward and more of a given. There are fewer literal rewards for players overall, simply the enjoyment of having ghosts mime out their stories and the long term reward of slowly gaining the ability to fly higher, the drawn out nature of which is seemingly tied to the medium of the mobile game. Once all the ghost narratives are finished, the player can continue to wander and explore and rewatch the stories with friends. Journey is more of a story/film and Sky is more of a play space and this reflects in the way flying is used.