Create Cyriak Hand-Eyes in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hi!
Joey Korenman : What's up Joey here at School of Motion and welcome to day 27 of 30 days of after effects. I want to give a huge shout out to emotion, graphics, artists that I love and respect, and that is Cyriak. Now, if you're unfamiliar with his work, please go to his YouTube channel right now and just watch at least a dozen of his videos. Don't do it right before you go to sleep, though. That's a bad idea. Cyriak has this amazing brain that comes up with this really weird stuff. And what I love about it is that he does it all in after effects, just using brute force. For the most part, there's not like a trick to what he does. He's just very precise and very patient. And he does a ton of roto and tracking and hand animation. And it's very, very hard and very, very time consuming.
Joey Korenman : That's why most people don't do it. It's just too hard. So I want to show you how I made this crazy thing behind me, which was inspired by one of his videos. You're going to see how much work it takes, but hopefully you're going to learn some cool tricks and maybe get a new appreciation for Cyriak's work. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on school emotion. Now let's hop into after effects and get started.
Joey Korenman : So this is the, uh, the masterpiece that we're going to be creating here. Uh, and I don't know this kind of, this fits my sense of humor, which I think is why I love Cyriak's work so much. I want to show you the piece of his, that, um, that I was sort of inspired by. Um, and I wanted to recreate for this video. Uh, so it starts with him, you know, staring at you for an awkwardly long period of time before his head turns into this weird crab monster. And, uh, there's a lot of, it's not a thing Cyriak kind of does in his work. He's kind of has a lot of these mouths and tongues and weird eyes and weird spots. And, uh, he seems to be obsessed with, um, body parts being used in ways they weren't meant to be used. Um, I want to point out one thing, which is at the very beginning of this animation here, where the head turns into the hand, it's done in a very slick way.
Joey Korenman : And to me, what this looks like is a plugin called R E flex, which is it sort of lets you do really, really high-end morphing in after effects. And I don't have that plugin and it costs $600. So I did this a different way, but I wanted to point that out. That's one of, and I could be wrong. Um, Cyriak is known for doing things that just take a really long time and doing a lot of hand rotoscoping and moving. So maybe he built this effect by hand, but it looks like, uh, like our flex. Um, and I just wanted to point that out because I do my effect a little differently. I have the monster come of my mouth, uh, so that I could avoid having to use the morphing plugin. So just so you guys know, so let's, uh, let's start just by looking at the footage I shot.
Joey Korenman : So here's the main piece of footage, just me sitting against the wall. And I did this, I don't know, 10 times, uh, before I settled on a take that I liked. Um, so step one is, I don't know, maybe you need to drink a little bit or, or if you're like me, you just, you have no shame. And so you're happy to get in front of a camera and do this. Um, and I didn't do anything to this footage yet. This is just straight footage. Um, then I started shooting all the parts of the monster I was going to need. So here's the shot of the hand. Now this chair here, this is actually like a camping chair that I had kicking around and it just happened to be like the perfect chroma green color. Um, you know, I'm shooting these videos in my spare bedroom at this point.