Jeff Scher

Esther Robinson's portrait of her uncle Danny Williams, Warhol's onetime lover, collaborator and filmmaker in his own right, offers a exploration of the Factory era, an homage to Williams's talent, a journey of family discovery and a compelling inquiry into Williams's mysterious disappearance at age 27.

Indecisive newlyweds get into a series of misadventures while on a day trip from Manhattan to Hoboken, New Jersey.

Jeff Scher's short animation, first released in 2020.

This film was a test of an idea for bi-pack shooting. I used some outtakes from Trigger Happy and had a positive and negative high-contrast print made. I had access to an Oxberry animation camera which had the ability to shoot “bi-pack,” which is to say two strands of film could be loaded into the camera gate at the same time, sandwiched together. By shooting through the black-and-white high contrast film, I could use it as a sort of filter, or contact print. This lets one fill in all the white or clear areas of the film with whatever artwork was under the camera. By shooting the same raw film through the negative and then winding it back and re-shooting it through the positive, I could replace both the black and the white of the film with whatever was on the stand. It was done very quickly in a spontaneous exploratory way. The resulting film test, one hundred feet of 16mm film had the original Trigger Happy outtakes now colored very vividly.

“Trigger Happy” was made with hundreds of objects found on the streets and sidewalks of New York. It began as an attempt to make an animated ballet, but as I was shooting the dance turned rowdy, into more of a nocturnal revel. It was shot on a lightbox with high-contrast film. The backlight silhouetted the objects, making them into graphic icons of themselves. The resulting film is a negative, which turned the objects white and the background black as asphalt. It makes the dance almost phantasmagoric. The trigger I was happy about was on the camera, but the title also fits the velocity of the imagery. Much of the animation happens by the rapid replacement of one object with another. It’s the afterimage in your eyes that animates the difference between the shapes, as one is replaced by another, and another… The music by Shay Lynch perfectly captures the idea of dancing in the streets.” —Jeffrey Noyes Scher

"I made this in 1975 while in college. It was my anti smoking response to Oskar Fischinger's cigarette commercials. It was aired a few times on PBS." –Jeff Scher

In short, it's a film about winter. And to create it, Jeff Scher composed approximately 2,250 watercolor paintings on paper. Each one is elegant and beautiful in itself, depicting classic snowy scenes, but when composited together, we see incredible movement and fluidity revealed as cold memories bleed into one another.

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 is retold in song and animation.

Jeff Scher's 2013 ode to underground public transport.

An animated short film created by the artist Jeff Scher.

This film was shot before Grand Central became a tourist attraction and overrun with their lazy directionless gait. It would be a different film if shot today, as the tourists have undermined the flow and energy of the crowd motion. (..) - Jeff Scher

A Motion picture adaptation of the book. Also, my first film in French.

Animated on a lampshade by Jeff Scher with music by Shay Lynch.

Bang Bang was an experiment in animating positive and negative Rorschach-like bilaterally symmetrical ink blots. It is at heart a flicker film, where black-and-white images are smacked on the screen in rapid intervals in pursuit of afterimage effects. It is best viewed wide-eyed focusing on the center of the screen.

A short animation featuring a spinning slice of bread by Jeff Scher with music by Shay Lynch.

Painted on a revolving “wheel” of paper mounted on a rig, the film is an animated series of “loops" as the wheel is rotated over and over and paint is added onto previous layers. The result is a cascading waterfall of colors that grows denser and denser until it’s all paint.

Scher made this in 1976 as a student at Bard College. He printed it to negative years later and liked the way it looked better than the now faded original film.

No synopsis available yet.

The film is a film of Japanese traditional fabric stencil in a non-repeating single frame pattern.

The kiss is particularly interesting to me, as it’s one of the best things we all get to do, yet almost everyone does it with their eyes closed.

In Warren, Scher turns the table on his former teacher and mentor, creating an intimate dialogue between friends as well as a battle of directorial wills, at a moment when Scher recognized that Sonbert was becoming ill.

A diverse compilation of short animations from NYC's popular festival, Animation Block Party. Various genres and narratives. A great mix-tape of student and professional work, featuring old-school and new-school animations of varied genres.

Soundtrack: American Royalty

This film was really Sid’s idea, I was just the cameraman. Sid was an obsessive Boston Terrier whose idea of bliss was to be swung around on a rubber pork chop. I was happy to accommodate him. Sid was shot with a 16mm Beaulieu camera which can be seen in shadow at one point in the film. Sid can also be heard barking mixed into Shay’s music. - Jeff Scher

No synopsis available yet.