Fold.
Throw.
Glide.
A single sheet of paper takes off at sunrise and flies until midnight. Scroll to fold it, throw it and follow it across the sky.
Sunrise.
Seven folds turn a flat sheet into a wing. The crease along the middle becomes the keel, which keeps the plane flying straight.
Lift.
Air moving under the tilted wings is pushed down, so the plane is pushed up. Paper airplanes glide at about 1 meter down for every 8 meters forward. Enough speed and they can even loop.
Over the
city.
The light turns gold, then pink. One by one, windows light up below as the city gets ready for the night.
Lights on.
Everything you're seeing is drawn live in code: the sky, the hills, the buildings and the plane. There are no videos or images.
Night
crossing.
Out over the ocean, the moon lays a path of light on the water and the stars come out.
Touch down.
This is a design example.
Paper Flight is an animation experiment I designed and built to show motion design and scroll storytelling. It's not a product, a company or a real flight.
Every frame is generated in the browser with canvas: time of day, parallax layers, the folding animation, the flight path and the planes you throw.