Cyriak Harris

Cyriak is an animator best known for creating very strange, often creepy animations out of captured footage or photos. Most of his animations use very dark themes, or at least to the point where things mutate and get a bit mental.

I really like Cyriak's animation because of some of the trippy effects he can pull off with the most unlikely source materials, such as the video below, of a lamb trotting through a field, but what he does to it gives a huge array weird and wonderful creatures created from just one source clip. While I don't know how exactly he creates these animations, it is something I would like to learn, as the editing techniques alone could be fun to try out, though I do know it takes a long while to produce.

Another one of my favourite by him is an animation called 'Walks of Life', and features a finger worm at the beginning, that soon turns into all sorts of creatures imitating dinosaurs and even people. The main portion of the animation is suppose to show evolution in a way, but with the usual Cyriak twist on it. 

All in all, Cyriak is one of my favourite animators at the moment, as his work is something truly unique that manages to be nice to look at, and at the same time be horrifying. (Also, BeastEnders, a parody of Eastenders deserves a mention just because of how ridiculous it is).

VICE Competition Brief Evaluation/SWOT Analysis

During this module, I needed to work in a team to create an ident for VICE's 'Rule Britannia' documentary. I was in a team with Jan and Chris, of which we all lead one ident each, as we needed to produce three as a team. For the module however we needed to make the idents using compositing techniques, which I was slightly disappointed about since I would have preferred to make an ident just using techniques I am more familiar with.

The main strength for myself and my team during this module was the way in which we worked together, and how efficiently I feel we communicated during the duration of the module. For example, I feel like we helped each other with the work well, contributing to each others projects as we went along. I contributed to both Jan and Chris' ident, by doing 3D modelling to add to the animations.

I feel my biggest weakness was actually the quality of my final product. Though the quality of the set up composite in Cinema 4D, with the 3D objects mimicking the environment, was actually of decent quality I feel, the animation and 3D assets themselves could have been far better. I feel like this was mainly down to my indecisiveness on what I wanted my final product to be, and I left it too late, so I had to make it quickly for the deadline.

The main opportunity I took from this was the experience and learning of compositing techniques, which all in all I actually enjoyed doing, I just wish it wasn't part of the VICE brief (for college), as I feel like I would have been able to embrace both the ident competition and the compositing module if they were separate.

In the future I hope to do more composites using the techniques I learned in this module, as I did enjoy making composites, but I feel like my final product didn't do it justice.