Cycles 

(2010) 

by Cyriak illustrates the day Worthing sea-front was invaded by infinite teddy-bears. No teddy bears were harmed in the making of this video. Music also by Cyriak. The software used was Adobe After Effects.

.net: What’s the process you go through when you create something like Cycles?

Cyriak Harris: I’d had the idea for Cycles a few years ago. It’s a recurring theme of mine to take a basic piece of video footage and mess about with it to the point of insanity. I also had a teddy bear that I’d created for some other project who wanted to star in his own film. Added to this was a new video camera I wanted to test out, and a song I had made that needed some visuals – so with all these ingredients the film more or less made itself. I don’t usually even storyboard my animations – I start with a vague version of the finished film in my head, and spend the next few weeks throwing the elements together until they do what I want. The results aren’t always predictable, but usually interesting.

 

Source: antima55

 

 

My favourite is what appears to be Cyriak's most recent work, the brilliant Cycles, for which he deserves some sort of Bafta. Put aside what you're doing and watch it now. It's most effective if you put the music (by Cyriak) at full volume.
So often, things described as zany or surreal aren't funny – but this gets massive laughs from me, like the opening title sequence to the best-ever TV kids' show that you can't actually remember having seen and that no-one would never allow on the air anyway. No matter how many times I watch it, I keep forgetting to keep an eye on the apparently real background people walking on the beach, and trying to spot the various moments where Cyriak is tinkering with their reality. It's sort of Terry Gilliam meets Banksy meets MC Escher.

 

Source: The Guardian

 

 

Cycles, *****, animals, cars, Video Art

Reading

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

 

SEE ALSO

David O'Reilly (*1985) is a young Irish animator working out of Berlin. 2009 he won the best short film Golden Bear in Berlin for Please Say Something, a melancholy modern day kitchen sink drama between a loving cat-type creature and an inattentive mouse. He also created the Youtube cult Octocat animations under the pseudonym Randy Peters, a nine year old kid. He also directed the lush animated video for U2 and their new single I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight and has made it into another beautiful small dramatic story. (State.ie)

_grau (2004) is a personal reflection by Robert Seidel on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally. Various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds. Music by Heiko Tippelt and Philipp Hirsch. (Australian electronic music, arts, media, project listings)

Michael Fakesch feat. Taprikk Sweezee: Blackbird (2009) by Hamburg-based creative shop Giraffentoast created the surreal music promo for the first single called Blackbird. (stash)

Alex Rutterford is a British director and graphic designer working mostly on music videos. He studied graphic design at the Croydon School of Art and graduated in 1991. His most well-known works include the videos for Gantz Graf by Autechre, Verbal by Amon Tobin and Go to Sleep by Radiohead. (Wikipedia)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)