“It can be a long story. I can tell you, or I can try and summarize it,’ said Finn Harries, a sophomore studying architectural design at Parsons who doubles as a YouTube creator with over 4.1 million subscribers.
He carried a rush of late November air with him into Joe’s coffee shop, quickly apologizing for being fifteen minutes late. But who can blame the London native when his Google calendar is more packed than the L train during rush hour.
After politely refusing a cup of coffee and exchanging small talk, I could sense a certain tension in him.
It wasn’t until I began explaining that I was intrigued to get to know him as an individual, separate from the entity that has become JacksGap, the YouTube channel created by his twin brother Jack that Harries latched onto shortly after back in 2011, that a smile along with a sigh of relief erased any previous signs of tension. “I’m happy you said that,” Harries said.
He always knew his deepest passions didn’t stem from creating online content and the internet fame that followed it. It was somewhere along the swooping lines of sketches and chewed up pencils that Harries said he found his calling, something far more fulfilling than the glamorous YouTube work that’s netted he and his brother millions of fans.
This infamous YouTube channel came to be when the brothers decided to take a gap-year before attending their respective universities.
“My brother started setting up a YouTube channel that year,” Harries said. “He wanted to record it and have a visual diary of his year off.” While Jack began filling up his YouTube channel with travel vlogs, storytelling, and challenges, Harries pursued freelance graphic design for a start-up company based in his native London.
It wasn’t until JacksGap really took off well into 2011 that Jack proposed for Harries to make an appearance in one of his videos. After some convincing, Harries reluctantly agreed. The enormous popularity, lusting fan girls, and the over 8 million views that the video titled “My Brother Finn” accumulated ultimately led Harries to join forces with his brother.
The first YouTube Video Harries appeared in on JacksGap titled “My Brother Finn.”
Although Harries played a vital role in the content creation for the channel, he was always more intrigued with the design process and less with appearing in front of the camera. He created a logo and began building a website that encompassed the brand that JacksGap was quickly becoming.
“I’m still totally insecure about sitting in front of a camera, but it seems like it’s going really well so I’m just going to keep going for it,” Harries said.
As the gap year came to a close, the channel had reached the 100,000 subscriber mark. After attempting university for a couple of months, an influx of opportunities and emails overflowed their inboxes on a daily basis, urging them to drop out and dedicate all their energy and attention back to JacksGap.
Upon their decision to leave university, the brothers immediately founded a production company called Digital Native Studios. “ When we started this company, we started to get more ambitious with the films we were making,” Harries said.
A large turning point for their channel was when they received sponsors from companies such as Skype and Sony Entertainment to fund a trip across India with five friends over the span of three weeks. This sponsorship led them to create and upload a four part documentary series called “The Rickshaw Run” to JacksGap, each episode racking in anywhere from 1.4 to 2.1 million views.
“The problem for me was that I did all this design work, the website, the logo – but the design work was starting to trail off. It’s almost like it had all been done,” Harries explained.
In a state of unfulfillment, he began to get an itch that he wanted to explore architecture, a field he was always interested in.
“It was a slow transition realizing I was more happy when I was designing, making something tangible that I could hold, rather than something that lived in a screen,” Harries said.
It wasn’t until a trip to New York City where these twins were working on their next film that he decided to pay a visit to Parsons School of Design.
“I started to kind of dream about studying architecture in New York and I guess I got itchy feet despite the amazing success we had and all these opportunities coming in,” Harries said.
So very quietly while running the business, Harries sent out an application to study architectural design at Parsons. Upon his acceptance, he was faced with yet another tough decision to make: to continue on with the comfort and success that JacksGap was providing or to seek out something he was more passionate about.
“I kind of felt like I was always there temporarily to help. I never felt a full sense of ownership over it even though we share it equally,” Harries said.
One of the first classes he took at Parsons was sustainable systems, inspiring him to collaborate with JacksGap on one final project: a fifteen minute documentary shot in Greenland and London set to release this month.
Education is another topic that entices Harries, so naturally one of this first projects away from JacksGap fulfilled this interest. Harries is currently working with The School Fund, a San Francisco based charity that funds children who are ambitious for education in developing countries. He created a design strategy to better market this organization and is set to shoot two promotional videos in Kenya and Tanzania this March.
Leaving the familiar of JacksGap has allowed him to get back to the root of what he loves doing. “When you run a business and things start to grow the way they did, you can start to lose the sense of creativity in what you’re doing,” Harries said. “So coming back here [Parsons] has been really refreshing because I’ve been able to focus on creating and doing more conceptual work rather than making decisions that affect the team around me.”
“Have you ever been in the architecture building?” curiously asked Harries to a seemingly clueless liberal arts student who solely hibernates in the Lang building on 13th street.
We walked up the street, with my coffee still in hand, to the entrance of the building that houses approximately 45 architectural design students among others.
The elevator opened to an open-concept room, mostly composed of individual workspaces belonging to architecture students. We weaved in and out of desks where students sat creating, as he greeted his peers along the way. His desk was an organized mess, looking very much lived in.
As he rummaged through his work, he pointed out his most recent project – a model of a water harvesting structure. As his fingers skimmed the design, delicately tracing over every detail, his voice filled with passion, his eyes wondering where this city will take him next.
Sydney is a current Junior studying Journalism & Design at Eugene Lang and the Co-Editor-In-Chief of The New School Free Press. She spends a questionable amount of time responding to emails, remembering coffee orders for her various internships, producing films & frolicking around the Lower East Side where she’s living her New York dream of occupying a bedroom with a brick wall.
