Jun 4, 2019

Michael Frey's "Kids" is a short film, game, and installation all in one.

Among the dozens of short films to be screened in competition next week in Annecy is one that was never conceived as a film at all. In Michael Frey's "Kids," a group of featureless humanoids play out absurd and often violent scenarios, guided by a kind of crazy groupthink; "Kids" is simultaneously being developed as a game, in which the player takes control of these hapless individuals.

Frey has been here before. After releasing his previous work, "Plug & Play," the Swiss animator teamed up with developer Mario von Rickenbach to turn it into a game. Frey was inspired by the way viewers interact with movies online, where they tend to scrub, pause, and stop in the middle of a film rather than passively watch it

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Frey and von Rickenbach collaborated again on Kids. This time, however, it was envisioned from the start to be both a game and a movie. But in fact, as Frey tells Cartoon Brew, it began as an installation:

The first platform the project had was at the Museum of Digital Art (MuDA) in Zurich in 2018. It was a massive public beta test of the project, showcasing not only the work in progress, but also all the garbage we created in the process of developing the project at the time. We also considered ways to [convey] the physicality and weight of the characters by creating dozens of actual KIDS mannequins, as well as their responses to animation, sound, and on-screen input.

While the concept of this project is complex and the production may be unorthodox, its aesthetic is as simple as Plug & Play. Indeed, the blank white characters in Kids live in a monochrome world as binary as the choices they face:

My role is to think while drawing, while Mario's is more about thinking while coding. I use a variety of drawing tools, but most importantly my fingers. Mario uses various text editors to code, and in the case of KIDS, our stuff is assembled in a game engine called Unity. The film and the game utilize the same technology.

From the beginning, we wanted to make a film with code. We wanted to keep the style visually simple, yet allow for a level of complexity that could not be achieved with traditional 2D animation production methods. developing "Kids" as a short animation and a game at the same time was exponentially more complex. with "Plug & Play," we had a finished film, Many constraints had already been given to us; "Kids" was an experiment from the start, and we tested and discarded ideas relentlessly over the years until "Kids" grew into something we liked.

The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and is currently touring the festival circuit. The game recently became available for play on desktops, tablets, and cell phones. For more information, see the official website. Published in collaboration with Double Fine Presents, the project is co-produced by Playables, SRG SSR, and Arte.