We’re always thrilled to watch S/W alums branch out into fresh creative territory. The well-trodden path usually sees filmmakers graduating from shorts to feature films or television projects – a natural progression in the industry. Every so often, we’ll also see a director make the leap into publishing, translating their cinematic storytelling into the written word (Mikey Please being the most recent to take this path). But one avenue that never fails to spark our particular excitement is when a previously featured filmmaker ventures into the world of video games.

It’s a medium that shares cinema’s love of narrative and visual craft, yet offers a totally different kind of immersion and interactivity. Over the years, we’ve seen remarkable examples of this crossover, including David O’Reilly’s meditative and philosophical Everything, Graham Parkes’ deeply emotional Before Your Eyes and Florian Grolig’s visually-striking mobile game High Rise – each bringing a distinctly cinematic sensibility to interactive storytelling.

One of the most consistently innovative creators in this space is Michael Frei, whom we first spotlighted in 2015 with his short film Plug and Play – a quirky, surreal piece that also spawned an interactive version, later adapted into a game for mobile devices and gaming platforms. Frei continued to blur the lines between film and interactive art with Kids, a hypnotic exploration of crowds and collective behaviour, available on both mobile and desktop. His latest project, Time Flies, developed in collaboration with Raphaël Munoz, is described as “a little adventure about our limited time in this world” – a playful yet poignant reminder of life’s fleeting nature.

We reached out to Frei, to ask him what can players expect from the game and how does it tie in to his short film work?

In Time Flies, the player experiences life as a fly. It’s quite silly and a bit sad. It takes roughly 90-min to play through the game. In that way it almost as if it’s my first feature film.

All my previous interactive work had a short film component. Plug & Play was a short film first before it was turned into an interactive piece. Kids was a produced as a short film and a game simultaneously and was turned into an exhibition piece later on. After working on Kids I wanted to approach a project by only looking at it as an interactive piece for the first time. But I couldn’t help myself to create a short animated spin-off film called Long Distance. The 2-min short is present in the game but has also had a life on its own at film festivals.

My previous films all focused on the relationships between characters in a mostly empty world. In Time Flies I was conceptually interested in further reducing the visual complexity of my main character (as it is merely a pixel most of the time) while focusing more on creating a world full of things the character could interact with.

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Time Flies is available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Steam, Epic Games Store and Mac App Store. More details below:

Description

In Time Flies, you’re a fly – your life is short and your bucket list is long! Learn an instrument, read a book, become rich, get drunk, or make someone smile. And if you don’t feel like pursuing your goals, you can just relax, clean your wings, and listen to music. Make the best of the time you have left, because we’re all going to die.

Features

• Explore a painstakingly hand-drawn, densely detailed world
• Dozens of unique and obscure goals to accomplish
• Numerous intriguing ways to die
• Grimly variable life expectancy based on player location
• Delightfully accurate fly physics