#chluaid

Adam Philips, an animator whose work I have admired for quite some time, today released the game BrackenSack in early access. The game features characters known as the “dashkin” -- creatures from the mysterious Brackenwood who can travel with astonishing speed.

Many, many years ago, I was first introduced to the character known as Bitey, one such dashkin, in what remains one of my favorite animated shorts of all time, “The Yuyu” -- animated in Flash.

And, really, this post is just an excuse to link to “The Yuyu” -- so here it is:

It's the middle of July so FLASHBack is off on another visit to Brackenwood, the fantastical world created by former Disney animator Adam Phillips. This month's animation, Littlefoot (No, not that one), was released by Phillips on his Bitey Castle website on 5 November 2005, and then posted to Newgrounds three days later on November 8th, where it was Frontpaged, and won the Daily Feature and Weekly User's Choice awards. This chapter of the Brackenwood Saga focuses on the bigfoot-like Morrugs, in particular a pint-sized juvenile of the race, hence the title. The story opens with Littlefoot's parent frantically searching the forest and calling out for them, and Adam uses some shots in this sequence to demonstrate depth-of-field effect, where the "camera's" focus is narrowly limited to the subject of the shot at the particular moment. We then cut to a scene of some Brackenwood wildlife, a feathergnat being eaten by a petalfly, which then floats off, jellyfish-like. (The petalflies were originally called Umbrellaflies, but Philips changed the name, reasoning that Brackenwood doesn't have umbrellas.)

The petalfly attracts the attention of the missing Littlefoot, who goes bouncing down a hill after it and then follows it into a grassy field clearing. The scene then cuts to Bitey, who is being his usual horrid self, until he's confronted with a spider, which absolutely unnerves him. (The look on the spider's face when Bitey runs off is absolutely priceless.) Bitey's retreat brings him to the same field that Littlefoot is in, and he goes back into brat mode, stalking up on the young morrug just as it's about to make friends with a fatsack. Bitey torments Littlefoot, who flips into berserk mode, eyes going green as a signal for "this morrug's going feral on your ass". We get some more good depth-of-field as the parent, also in a green-eyed angry state, snatches Littlefoot from Bitey with a roar. The dashkin bully can't leave it at that though, and uses his speed to run up, throw a clod of dirt and grass at them and run off again. The morrugs then demonstrate why you don't get in a throwing-things fight with them, by throwing a pair of boulders at Bitey, braining the jerk senseless.

We're then treated to Phillips being an absolute show-off with his lighting work, giving us a gorgeous example of a sunset/moonrise portion of a day/night cycle. But as the moon comes up, an ominous chant begins to arise: "YUYu, YUYu, YUYu..." Out of the darkness, a score of shadowy and twisted humanoid figures with glowing eyes and fangy pointed teeth rise up, and begin speaking in an alien sounding tongue. They note that Bitey is injured, and then declare that they will steal him, ending the animation on that cliffhanger. This ending seems to come out of nowhere, but it was actually hinted at with some very well hidden easter eggs throughout the animation. Phillips had actually made a contest where he had hidden 20 things for the fans to find and screenshot, and the contest went unwon, because no one found them all (the prize was a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 and a Bitey T-Shirt). A handful of the hidden easter eggs were early appearances by the creatures at the end.

Adam also included an homage to the controversial SFX/SEX dust scene from The Lion King, a face hidden in the thrown boulder, and a reflection of Bitey in Littlefoot's eyes. Most of the easter eggs hidden in this Flash however, were messages written in a constructed language that Phillips had invented for Brackenwood, called Sarus. Sarus is an evolution of an earlier 19th century real-world ConLang, Solresol. Both use the Do-Re-Me-Fa-So-La-Ti pitch nomenclature (known as Solfège). While Sarus is based on variants of those seven syllables, it could alternately be communicated with their corresponding musical notes, a color spectrum, or even hand gestures. (The same association of notes, colors, and hand gestures also applies to Solresol, which was used as the basis of Earth's attempts to communicate with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)

For this animation's easter eggs however, he used a written form of Sarus called septaglphys in which the syllables of a Sarus word were represented by pen strokes made from corner to corner of a seven sided polygon. The first few septaglyph easter eggs were just instructions on where to look for further easter eggs, but then Phillips began foreshadowing the cliffhanger ending, with phrases such as "la miflyt mirek mimrum / the hills have eyes", "la lafyd laf la somid / the lady of the night", and "dorlyt laf la soruf / people of the shadow". (More or less -- the word "laf" translates to "of" in the earliest versions of Sarus, but this was later changed to be Sarus for "less". In the most recent versions of the language, "of" is translated as "remir".)

There was also a Sketchpad easter egg at the end, featuring lineart concept drawings. When Philips first released the animation, he billed it as Part 1 of 2, and hidden past the sketchpad was a note in Sarus septaglyphs that said that the story is not finished. As it turned out though, this particular story arc was big enough that it wouldn't get finished in part 2 either. Part 1 would be the last time that Adam would compose and record his own music; subsequent Brackenwood Flashes would feature outside music talent.