Overview

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Learn to recreate Cyriak's surreal hand animation style in After Effects with this hour-long tutorial. Explore techniques for filming, editing, and manipulating green screen footage to achieve bizarre recursive hand effects. Follow along step-by-step as the instructor breaks down Cyriak's unique aesthetic, demonstrates how to capture and prepare hand footage, and walks through the process of building increasingly complex layers of nested compositions. Gain insights into working with time remapping, masking, and other essential After Effects tools to produce mind-bending animations inspired by Cyriak's distinctive visual style. Download the provided project files to practice these techniques and push your motion graphics skills in strange new directions.

Syllabus

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for School of Motion. Now in this lesson, things are going to get a little bit weird. I love the work done by Cyriak. And if you don't know who he is, you're going to want to pause this video right now and go check out his stuff. It's weird, right? His stuff is very unique and I wanted to figure out just how the hell he does it. One of the best ways to figure out how something was made is to try and make it yourself. So that's exactly what we're going to do in this lesson. We are going to take one of Cyriak animations and try to rebuild it from scratch. Don't forget, sign up for a free student accounts. You can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now let's hop into after effects and see if we can figure this out. So let's, let's hop on YouTube and I'm going to show you guys something that if you haven't seen it before, it's going to give you nightmares. And then we're going to try and figure out how Cyriak actually made this. So check this out.
Joey Korenman : I mean, how creepy is that?
Music : [creepy music]
Joey Korenman : All right. That's enough. So a lot of Cyriak's work deals with repetition and things that kind of build on in this infinite loop, almost like fractals, you know, and spiral growth and all of these sort of natural phenomenon. And he, and he takes that and he applies it to manmade things or to, you know, hands and cows and sheep. And really he's a sick twisted genius. And he does all this in after effects. And I've always wondered how in the world he does it. Um, so I decided to try to figure it out and it was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. So let's hop into after effects and I'm going to walk you guys through a lot of the steps that it took to recreate this animation. So very handy for me, Ringling has a full green screen studio.
Joey Korenman : So I went in there after class one day and I took my iPhone in one hand and I just stuck my other hand out in front of me and just kind of tried to mimic that hand opening that I saw in Siri X video. So I tried it a bunch of different times because it's, you know, it's actually pretty hard to hold an iPhone and videotape your hand and keep things in focus. And you can see that, you know, on the few takes, my thumb got clipped off, things like that. So I did this a bunch of different times. I'm not sure what camera Cyriak used when he did his version. Um, but all I had handy was an iPhone. And so, um, you know, you use what you have. So really all I needed to do was find one good hand opening. Okay. That one's okay.
Joey Korenman : That one's pretty good. And the key that I noticed on, um, on Siri X animation is that he would basically replace the tips of the fingers with a fist. So I wanted to find a tape that had a nice roundness to this area. And as the hand opens that round is gradually turns into the finger. So that's actually a pretty good take right there. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of clip that out. I'm going to duplicate this layer. So I'm going to duplicate this and then I'm going to clip this layer just so I have the in and the outright where I want it. Um, and a good hot key for that is option left bracket. All right. And then I'm going to move forward.
Joey Korenman : Okay. Now I actually want to make that even a little bit tighter because what I'm going to do is as soon as the hand is in the position I want, I'm going to freeze frame it and I'm going to do the same thing at the beginning. So let's, let's play forward until the hand just starts to turn. And then let's just step back frame by frame. And let's say, that's the first frame. So we're going to clip to there, and now I'm going to go to the end by hitting, oh, it takes you to the end of a layer and I'm going to step backwards. Okay. Now the hand is finishing its turn. So I'm stepping forward.