A good animator is believed to be one of the most sought-after artists as animation requires a lot of skill and practice. An animator not only creates animations, he has to give his characters life. To do that he needs to be talented, to be creative, to have mastered technical skills and the art of movement. Randy Chriz Perera is one such talented animator and artist who’s been producing great pieces of art and animation for over a decade. This week Youth Observer brings you Randy’s success story.
How it all started
Randy said that he started off with his ink-on-paper-work for Inktober 2017. He kept on delivering constant content to his steadily growing viewers and fan base.
He has a signature style that can be recognised across his many creations of art and animation, which is one of the reasons why there is a demand for his work.
His recent work include, a digital drawing for the global ‘We are Venom’ competition organised by Talenthouse as part of the marketing campaign for the release of the Venom movie.
The piece was recognised by Talenthouse, listing it among the top five digital art submissions for the campaign. Soon after this victory, Randy’s animated music video for Stigmata’s ‘Idle Mind is the Devil’s Workshop’, was chosen as the winner of the Asia Music Video Awards, hosted by ‘Chanelfix’, after four tough battle rounds with other artists’ submissions from all over Asia.
Illustrations
Apart from his animation skills, Randy is mostly sought after for his illustrations. The combination of artistic skills and animation are considered a very valuable asset locally. Randy believes that, this is mostly due to the lack of educational avenues available in Sri Lanka for young talent who have no financial support.
“The courses that are available here are very expensive, the graphic design jobs we get hired for don’t pay us enough to pursue such courses and nor can our parents afford it,” says Randy.
Randy is another one of those self-taught artists and animators, which is probably why his style is also very unique and unadulterated by the influences of Disney-Pixar character building and animation techniques. “I have much more work to put in before I can be personally satisfied with my level of creation but every day I push a little bit harder, a little bit further… I love trying out new styles in creation and challenge my own limits”.
Collaboration
Nine months after Randy embarked on his solo creative venture he decided that it was time to birth another idea that had been brewing for the past five years, a formula to fuse local talent without compromise. And in July 2018, with Portia Ratnayake joining Randy with her creative expertise in written content, communications and brand-building, ‘Meraki United’ was born: An exclusive club for select creative individuals to collaborate in producing original creative content that would hopefully move Sri Lanka’s entertainment industry towards the international spotlight.
“We realised that there are more people like us, who are desperate for a chance to create soulful work, who are extremely talented but have no platform or financial stability which allows them to make that commitment to the art. Meraki United is for us the war-horn, signaling the beginning of the rebellion of artists striving to achieve creative freedom” said Portia.
Meraki United now has six members who work nights and weekends at the Meraki studio, trying out new and old methods of creative expression. “The boys bring in all their tools and creative thinking to the studio and together we work on something we all love doing. We are absolutely ecstatic about the weekends now as the studio is always busy,” she added.
Latest masterpiece
One of Randy’s latest masterpieces, and a result of the collaborative effort of two Meraki team members namely, Achala Abayaratne and Omesh Perera, is the ceiling and outer wall murals done for the newly opened Geek Head Quarters café. Completed in seven days, this massive piece of art is definitely one of Meraki United’s crowning achievements. His vivid illustrations also grace the comic novel ‘The Last rain’ authored by Thilani Samarasinghe, featuring Sri Lanka in 2050. At the Lanka Comic Con held last August, Randy also introduced an original character design, christened Raaksha by those who follow Randy’s art. This is supposed to be a character from a story that he and Portia are writing.
Current work
Randy is currently working on the music videos of two international artists and has also contributed classical-character-animation sequences for the upcoming lyric video for Janet Jackson’s new release Made for Now featuring Daddy Yankee (the lyric video is yet to to released).
He is also making waves with the fan-made lyric video he did for Eminem’s Believe from the album Revival.
Another recent local favourite of Randy’s lyric videos is the lyric video he did for Chamath Tharaka’s, Kaumadhi.