Artist Research ‐ David O' Reilly

David O' Reilly

The External World

David O' Reilly is an irish animator well known for his critically acclaimed videos and short films on both the internet and in film festivals. He has also worked on films as an animator and animation director.

The External World is a 17 minute video consisting of several short animations, often feature the same characters or variants of the same sketch.

All of David O'Reilly's animations feature the same intense style using pop culture, computer glitches and bright colours to create a very over the top animation often in a shocking or humorous way.

With this animation featuring a variety of short animations and sketches it makes O' Reilly's style a lot easier to identify as many themes reoccur throughout. For instance, taboo topics such as drug use, genitalia and sex are frequently used throughout his animations. 

In general, David O' Reilly uses 3D animation but in some instances such as with Octocat, he uses 2D animation. The style of 3D he uses is based around the use of basic, low poly count objects helping simplify the models and creating a style closer to 2D animation than conventional 3D visuals. 

This style works very well with the low brow, over the top themes and stories which O' Reilly approaches and usually works in his favour. I think that this is due to the fact that the innocent, cartoon-like appearance of the characters contrasts the shocking nature of the story and other content in an almost humorous way.

For his animation Octocat, O' Reilly again works off this to his advantage, creating the first half of the animation in the software MS Paint which is normally avoided due its limitations. Another reason why he might prefer to use 3D software is that a lot of his animations feature various "glitch" techniques which would be incredibly difficult to create in 2D and help add the modern, surreal edge to his animations.

In this instance with "The External World", the pace and timing of the animation is erratic and has little in regards to a consistent storyline instead revisiting characters such as the people in the nursing home, the sitcom and many more. However these scenes usually serve as short sketches rather an a continuing story and this does not affect the overall theme of the animation.

It seems that with this piece of David O' Reilly's work, the majority of the concepts were created individually rather than as a story and serve different purposes lacking narrative. The art style, though generally consistent varies in itself but he has used this to his advantage helping to add a chaotic, surreal piece of work demonstrating the versatility of himself as an artist.