So, I was unlucky enough to have the coronavirus a few weeks ago and it completely took me down. I spend most of my time watching and reading everything I could on the pandemic. My favourite was regular people's responses to the situation and how varied everyone's take on it was. The above video ‘Nascent Iodine Broski’ was inspired by a hidden gem I found on YouTube.

If we start by you telling us a bit about your background.
At the moment it's a jpeg of me and my family on a trip to Kazakhstan, it was taken on a trip to the Charyn canyon near Almaty. It was a super hot day and we all had really bad sunburn.

How did you get into photography and visual design?
At university I did a Fine Art Photography course, but I have a tendency to get sidetracked and ended up teaching myself coding instead. My professors were a bit confused but very supportive and my final piece was a piece of code on a CRT monitor whose sole purpose was to destroy itself and eventually crash the installation. This behavior has meant my work has explored quite a few different styles and mediums.

What concepts do you tend to veer towards?
The characters I made all have an uncanny valley feel to them, they are familiar but there's something not quite right about them. Sometimes the eyes or skin or movements will feel real but other parts seem more alien. I also love to keep in elements that show how the piece was made. Artifacts of polygons or badly cut pixels that show it was made in a software. Kind of like seeing the glue and scissor marks in a sketchbook.

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‘Reality 2 Us’ animated film. Music by myself, @eyedeep_inhell & @jimbo_mcslice #3danimation

A post shared by Éamonn Freel (@zeel_freel) on Jan 27, 2020 at 5:14am PST

Your work tends to be very textured and dictated by bright colours. What determines your colour palette?

I love to use bold and contrasting colours a lot, maybe because after you look at something on a screen for long enough it tends to become dull and uninteresting as your brain becomes familiar. I also love the look of colours on old analog screens and what it does to the hue and saturation, I often use this as a guide when giving my work the final look.

In your photography, how do you decide whether to take a more traditional or multi-layered approach to post-production? For example, whether to develop your images into a more traditional editorial feature, or an animation.

This mainly depends on who I am making work for or with. I have always been quite loose with my work and I was always worried that I didn't have a defined style because it drifts across different mediums a lot. I guess this kind of became a style in itself.

How would you describe the process of animating a motion graphic?
Like cooking a meal with no recipe. It's a lot of trial and error and you have to taste it often to make sure all the flavors are working together. Get the balance of salt, spice, sweet, bitter and sour right and you have a recipe for success. I'm the kind of person who just slaps together a meal with whatever's in the cupboard so this is easier said than done.

Out of all of the visual realms you experiment with, which one do you relate to the most?
Last year we made a video for Chinatown Slalom. It was inspired by early skate videos and the bizarre sketches you would get in between the action. We spent the day filming the guys roller skiing through Chinatown in Liverpool and I felt like I was a kid making early youtube videos again. Very nostalgic.

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GCSE Vlog Day 10

A post shared by Éamonn Freel (@zeel_freel) on Jun 25, 2019 at 8:01am PDT

Can you describe a day in the life of one of the figures you have designed?
I feel like the day would start with a few hours of loading time, installing new updates and rebooting. Once up and running the character would perform for a while before having an existential crisis and twitching out. At this point they will crash the system and terminate themselves.

How do you see motion graphics developing our future?
We are already at the stage where AI can compose a song or a poem or create a photo of a person that doesn't exist. While these are experimental and primitive now, they soon will be able to make real creative decisions. As a tool I find the possibilities of this very exciting.

Do you have any concerns about technology becoming the bedrock of civilisation?
I feel in the distant future we will merge with technology to the point where we are unrecognisable from the human state today. In the not so distant future, I am very excited about the possibilities of what technology will do for us.

If your graphic world was our reality, what would be the soundtrack to our lives?
It would definitely be one of those two hour long mash up mixes on soundcloud that seamlessly transitions between classical opera one minute and hardcore gabber the next, interspliced with profound Co-star quotes like ‘Illuminate your reality, buy a new lamp’.