Meet Eaven Harrington | Experimental Animator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Eaven Harrington and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Eaven, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I think it roots back to me being a visual learner because I’ve always relied on communicating by heavily referencing things I could visually point out to others. I’ve never abandoned thinking about this kind of learning tactic and grew into using it as a means of communication and especially as a means to express myself as an individual so a large part of my choice in choosing an artistic career path is because I want to surround myself with people who understand or are like-minded in similar aspects. It’s a deeply important priority in my life to always be connected to spaces where others are being creative and making different explorations in their works because not only is it fun to resonate over the various ways we as creators choose to interpret our lives and the planet we’re on but it’s a very special experience to talk to those who specialize in their own animation mediums to hear about how they use them to transcend their audience’s perspective. Like transporting someone to experience something completely wild & thrilling, to educate others through emotional sentiment and shared experiences, or simply because someone needed to make something and get it off their chest. The possibilities are endless and is so motivating to hear about how my peers think about tangibly executing all their ideas. As a career choice, I can’t see myself working in any space that doesn’t include atleast some vein of interpersonal, artistic interaction like this.

Another factor is that articulating myself verbally has always been a struggle, so through creative work, especially in animating, I can make something that embodies exactly what I want to see or bring to light and feel 1000% valid about it. It’s like the most cathartic way of “proving” my intrinsic value as a human being which sounds very detrimental to say, but no other medium makes me feel that same level of fulfillment. This makes it extremely gratifying to have others find details in my work that although I’d have difficulty describing verbally, these details can still be felt or seen through animation and people can relate to the nuances imbedded in my work.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m still exploring a lot when it comes to being the kind of animator I want to be and realistically, this is a passage that never ends because an artist’s path of self-discovery is always lifelong. I do hope that there are patterns within my work that can be seen as characteristics inherent to myself and that can be identified by others, but I also want to emphasize my excitement in seeing the possibility that I’ll make work that has changed over time to reflect how my human condition has grown. This belief I have is intersectional to why I describe myself as an experimental animator because I genuinely don’t want to make work that is repetitive of the things I’m used to seeing or I guess what I’m frequently exposed to in my corner of the world. My body of work has always been an in-flux reaction in trying to create animation that embodies more of things I want, don’t see enough of, or try to bring to reality because it doesn’t exist yet.

I’m in love with high-energy movement that bends perspective, unconventional camera angles and stretching of the metaphysical anatomy of my characters and objects to create an experience that sticks with the audience as a surreal, zany, and yet hopefully fun journey. Personifying creatures and inanimate things is also a consistent theme I greatly enjoy exploring because peeking into a headspace outside of our own human physicality expands our emotional capacity and forces us to speculate about circumstances beyond our very own. I think it can connect us to many sensorial and unspoken nuances that can eerily remind us of people we know or specific situations we’ve been in. The human experience is vast and by ironically stepping a bit outside of it, we can reel ourselves back in feeling a bit more profound. A big factor that helps me execute these thoughts into work is being a maladaptive daydreamer and listening to music is my biggest catalyst for visualizing wild movement and unorthodox beings. Because of this, it’s an extremely high priority in my work that my sound design fits perfectly with the timing of the movement or the exaggerated activity happening on screen. I want the viewer to get as close to physically experiencing one of my own maladaptive daydreams to feel how music and animation can be the most satisfying combo.

One last thing I’d want to add because it’s a crucial part of contributing to where I’m at today is that there are times when you may have to put your own creative work on the back burner for many reasons, but just because you aren’t able to produce work as frequently as you may want does not make a person any less of an artist. Everything creative people do takes an immense amount of time and many don’t have the privilege to completely embed themselves into their projects because that’s not realistic for humans. I find it frustrating that many conversations still revolving around animation have an underlying expectation that one must always be producing, or be holed up in the singular act of grinding away at animating. I reflect on this thought very often because my personal work always takes longer than I anticipate and it can easily get me down and make me feel lost in my creative identity, but the time I step away from my work has always proven to be useful when coming back to it. Animation is intersectional to the life we live outside the activity of it! And humans are intrinsically more than what we are often held to through our occupations and I want to vocalize this to be a reassurance to others who could be going through a similar struggle.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I’m a very lax person so a good time for me here would be eating a good dinner and lounging at a beach town. One of my favorite places to go nearby is heading down to Ventura Beach which is convenient for a bunch of reasons. It’s not very long of a drive, just about an hour away from where I’m at and I’d take a friend to one of the best restaurants that pop up along the way. It’s called El Pescador and it’s a Mexican seafood restaurant where you cannot go wrong with ordering a classic shrimp cocktail, some ceviche and their fajitas. While being in Ventura, one of the coolest places to go is the Majestic Ventura Theater. It’s quite old, but because of that, it’s beautiful and ornately decorated inside, especially around it’s stage and ceiling. They have shows playing there all the time and it’s my dad and I’s favorite place to catch any of the metal bands he’s been wanting to see.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
The two people who deserve the utmost shoutout are my brother and sister, Kai and Riki. Despite myself being their older sibling and striving to set good examples for them to look up to, they are always flooring me with how they choose to tackle the world as artists themselves and how they don’t let outer perspectives ever sway their creative integrity. They are both very decisive in their styles and where they choose their inspirations from to then unapologetically make the art they want. They have this innate level of assured confidence behind their creative processes and they are always reassuring me that I should feel the same about my own work. Because of them, I have countless experiences that eternally fuel my concepts as well whether it be trying to recreate quirks we all noticed in a social setting or their dry, witty humor that’s rooted in their mannerisms. I always think about applying these moments into plots or characters and it’s thanks to them that I subconsciously do this in everything I make. They overall give me so much courage in exploring what it means to be a creative individual and without the two of them, I’d have a very weak backbone hahaha.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soups_on_eav/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFEfnZW_bXB-Sfi8MZn5XmA