Al Jarnow

Documentary about the experimental animator.

Beginning with his work for a certain public television show that featured a big yellow bird, Al Jarnow captured life's scientific minutia and boiled it down for easy consumption between cookie eating monsters and counting vampires. Coupling time-lapse, stop motion, and cell animation with simple objects found in every day life, Jarnow deconstructed the world for an entire generation.

Things you can do with a single sheet of paper.

Kids recycle household objects to make a miniature city.

A group of kids demonstrate the concept of image resolution.

A method by which drawings can be enlarged on a grid.

Abstract geometric diagrams come to life.

Experimental computer imagery

A rap teaching kids how to use a waste basket.

A mind-twisting time-lapse beginning on a hill just outside town, doing for the concept of time what Charles and Ray Eames's 1968 film The Powers of Ten did for space. One billion years in two minutes.

No synopsis available yet.

A story about cooperation.

A rock performs an acrobatic feat for the assembled crowd.

Three rocks attempt to cross a river.

No synopsis available yet.

Daylight moves through a room. Or is it the room that moves?

After a day of gathering hundreds of seashells and rocks from the beach, Jarnow uses the found objects to construct a stop motion commentary on how we look at nature through various cinematic techniques.

A stop motion opus made up of hundreds of hand-painted wooden blocks that takes the viewer through a brief history of architecture. Primitive structures evolve into larger buildings...

Beach sand transforms into a lush tree-scattered landscape.

Shapes come to life on a pegboard.

A companion piece to Cosmic Letter, also produced for 3-2-1 Contact. Jarnow begins at his address in Brooklyn and zooms outward to the farthest reaches of the universe.

A short film made of cel drawings, showing us how various mammals, plants and objects all share similar skeletal structures. Produced for Sesame Street.

A filmed exercise that follows in the path of Rotating Cubic Grid and Cubits, the predictably titled Cube features cubes of varying shapes and size sliding around and growing into and out of one another, demonstrating how multiple parts can make up a whole.

Tondo introduces the cosmic formalism that was the primary theme of Al Jarnow's independent films. An infinite gridscape alternates with vibrating etchings, spirograms and other surreal realities.

Words that end in -ake and start with ch-. A typographic animation.