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.

The Behemoth

The Behemoth is a game development company that was created by Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds), Dan Paladin, John Baez, Brandon LaCava, and Nick Dryburgh in 2003. They have created three main games so far, Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, and Battleblock Theater, and all three feature super cool 2D animation, with very stylized and interesting characters. While not an animation company, most of their work so far has mainly featured 2D animation and artwork in Paladin's signature art style, which is something I really enjoy.

Animation Production Evaluation/SWOT Analysis

During this module I have created a few scenes for an animated short, featuring the character I created earlier in the year. Unfortunately I wasn't able to produce the complete animation, due to the project being ambitious for me at the time, but I did produce a few animations for the project, and did quite a lot of experimentation, such as using 'Keylight' to green-screen in Adobe After Effects.The production involved the use of 3D, 2D, and some rotoscoping, of which I used the three methods to create 4 different animations, one 3D intro scene featuring the street and sewer scene (which took up the majority of the production time), one 2D scene featuring rotoscoped hand turning around towards the camera in first person (from the view of the monster during transformation), one scene featuring the monsters face melting while it transforms, and one scene of the complete character 'Goop', doing a walk cycle.

During the module, I feel like my greatest strength was the way in which I learned new methods and techniques in the software I was using as I went, as well as the way in which I was able to add new ideas the animations with little disruption. I feel like I learned quite a lot during this module, such as how to use Keylight, without it causing me too much of a headache.

By far and away my biggest weakness during this module was simply the pace at which I modeled and animated the 3D environment for my Street/Sewer scene, which caused me to not be able to create other scenes for the animation. I do not really know why this was, but it may have been down to the project being rather ambitious for me at the time, so I thought I may have been able ton take on a bigger workload than I could.

One of the biggest opportunities to arise from this is the opportunity to use some of this work for my portfolio and show reel. Even though all of the scenes are not there, I feel as though the work I produced was of high quality for me, so I feel like it reflects the quality of work I could achieve at the time.

My main targets for after this module is to add more scenes to the overall production when possible, as I would quite like to finish it at some point, as quite a lot of effort went into it, and I am happy with the results so far

Character Design Evaluation/SWOT Analysis

During this module, I designed a character for which I would later use in an animated short. The character I created was based on the small illustration I made in the first week back to college; the slime skull. During the module, I gave the character a body, a basic back story, completed various turn around's, and created an expression guide. I named the character 'Goop', as I felt like it fit the character, being made of slime, but I felt like words like 'slime', 'sludge' etc. were too generic, but 'goop' is a less common word.

During the module, I feel my main strength was the way in which I experimented with and learned Adobe Illustrator, with the assistance of my tutor. During the module, I used features such as 'Pathfinder' and the 'Blend' feature to create the look of my character, with the descending 'slime' effect being made by 'cutting out' the shape of the skull from another shape, and then adding a blended shape behind it.

My main weakness during this module was that, on reflection, I really didn't do enough development work for my character; I generally just made the first thing that popped into my head and added it to the design. I also feel that I didn't put enough effort into the alternate poses for my character sheets, as I would have preferably liked to have more, and more varied poses. At least from this I can see these faults, so that I can work on not repeating them in the future.

The main opportunity this module opened up to me was to be more experimental in Adobe Illustrator, as before hand I pretty much just used the limited knowledge I had to create my illustrations, but now I am far more experimental, trying to make use of the many features available to create illustrations with far more interesting visual appeal.

In the future I aim to utilize the features I have learned about to create more interesting artwork and assets. I aim to play around with the software more, and try to learn more and more about the tools and features as I go along, as I feel this will help the quality of my illustrations, and allow me to create more visually appealing work.

Harry Partridge

For this module I need to list various artists and analyse/research them, so I thought I would list one of my favourite animators at the moment, Harry Partridge. This is mainly because of the quality of the frame by frame animation he creates, the use of dark/absurd humor in his animations, and the great, weird colour palettes he uses. Among my favorite animations of his are 'DR. BEES', the 'Starbarians' series, and 'Hitman Absolution: Hiding in Plain Sight'.

I mainly like this animation due to the fact that it's just so silly, and slightly dark, but it fits Harry's style so well. The animation is about a Wasp-themed super hero by day, Dr. Bees by night, and follows various scenarios involving bees. There are more videos involving Dr. Bees by Harry Partridge, but this is still my favourite.

This is the first episode of Starbarians, and is where we meet the two main characters, and see them 'face off' against an evil-doer. My favourite thing about this episode is the take on typical evil-trap type situations often seen in films. 

Week 2 Overview/Targets

During the second week back, I was mainly working on developing my character both visually and story wise.

Early on in the week, I started coming up with ideas for my characters. One of the main ideas I came up with for a character was a person/thing with a T.V. for a head. My initial idea for its emotions and such was that as its mood changed, the images/images would change on the screen, as well as its face changing. The same goes for the antennae of the television, it would change shapes depending on the mood. For example, if the character is angry, the screen would show flames coming from the bottom, and the antennae would scrunch up and look spiky. If the character was sad, the screen would show rain, with water dripping down from the top of the screen, and the antennae would flop down in front of the screen. Ultimately, I decided not to use this character for my animation, or at the least, not as the main character. We also felt like the idea was too similar to characters from the past, like Evil Edna from Willo the Wisp.

Instead, I decided to use the character I made in Illustrator last week, the Slime Skull character, which is still to be named. I did this because after speaking with Dave, we both felt like the Skull character was the more creative character with more scope for an animation. Through the week, I began to flesh out my character, as well as starting to think of what kind of body he would have, since the original design did not include a body. For the body I thought of having it be in a similar fashion as the skull, made of slime, and to be strangely proportioned, at least to the point of not looking human (when not in his disguise, which I will get to). Because he is made of slime and generally a bit weird, he feels like he needs to fit in with 'normal' people, so he wears a disguise. The disguise consists of a large overcoat, large glasses, and possibly a hat and mask. While in his disguise, his proportions would also change to more of a 'human' shape, so that he fits in and doesn't bring attention to himself. I have yet to actually design and draw out my character in Illustrator, but I feel like I now have a better idea of what my character.

Targets for next week:

• Draw out my character in Illustrator, getting a better understanding of what his body is going to look like.
• Finalize a possible story for the character, as I only have a basic understanding at the moment