Animation Nation: Cyriak

Cyriak Harris is a one-off, and something of a phenomenon. He creates near-inexplicably zany wonders of video and photo manipulation, bending normal computer programs to ridiculous, unfeasible lengths, to reflect his seemingly unhinged comic imagination – and it has earned him a sizeable international cult following.

With 400,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, his films have accumulated more than 100 million views: Cows & Cows & Cows (with its dancing cows that mutate into spiders, below) has 25 million views; Baaa (with mutating, subdividing sheep) has nearly 14 million views; Cycles (where giant teddy bears invade the Worthing seafront) has more than 5 million; and so on.

Cyriak (he likes to be known by just his first name) could also be described as the genuine successor to the young Terry Gilliam. Updating the cut-and-paste, stop-frame technique of Gilliam’s Monty Python animations in Photoshop and After Effects, he similarly revels in anarchic visual wit and jaw-droppingly surreal reworkings of existing footage.

Together with his surreal deconstructions of farmyard animals, and the occasional TV personality such as Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay (in the hilarious Powers of Ramsay), Cyriak has also created some mesmerising music videos – starting with his ‘video remix’ for Frankie Valli’s Beggin’ before getting into his stride with extraordinary work for Eskmo, Flying Lotus, Bonobo and Bloc Party.

In Bonobo’s Cirrus, released last year, archive film clips from the 50s are manipulated, duplicated and arranged into new suburbia-squashing giant robots; and with Bloc Party’s Ratchet – a rare occasion where he was asked to feature the artist in the video – Cyriak builds a new band performance from the band’s previous videos. “Music videos are ideal for me,” says Cyriak. “They usually give you a fair amount of creative freedom and take about a month to produce, which is about my limit for getting bored with a project. It also allows me the opportunity to try things I wouldn’t normally do.”

Moving things about with computers

For his other films, Cyriak invariably writes his own music – in fact the music always comes first. “Sometimes the tunes I make can sit for months or years before the animation joins them. And other people’s music will sometimes inspire ideas or styles that wouldn’t fit with my own tunes.”

He was inspired by animation early on. “Growing up with kids’ shows like Bagpuss and The Magic Roundabout you learn that animation is the realm of pure imagination,” he says. He studied animation in the 90s, and then “bummed around for a while” possibly waiting for technology to catch up with his imagination. Eventually a dead-end office job gave him access to Photoshop and the internet. He began experimenting with digital photo manipulation, and that was it.

He describes his style as “pretty much cutting out photos and moving them around, but with a computer. I use video footage a lot too, but it’s the same technique.” Some of his work is meticulously pre-planned – he has worked on several narrative projects with the illustrator Sarah Brown, eschewing his highly distinctive personal style, with considerable success. But most of his own videos emerge from experiments and improvisations. “I take a piece of footage and just play around with it to see what happens.”

It is perhaps not very surprising that someone with such an uncompromising vision as Cyriak has yet to make a big impression in the commercial world. But he has made some ads, including for Coca-Cola, where his vision more or less survived the process. “Working on ads differs from a lot of jobs in that you are often working for people who think they are creative, but aren’t. But in the end it’s their money so I’ve learnt not to get too precious about it. As long as they are paying me to animate weird stuff I’m reasonably happy.”