Jeff Scher is a New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

-based filmmaker, animator

Animator

An animator is an artist who creates multiple images that give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence; the images are called frames and key frames. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, video games, and the internet. Usually, an...

 and painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

. He was born Jeffery Noyes Scher, on December 24, 1954. Scher graduated from Bard College

Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

 in 1976. He is married to Bonnie Siegler and they currently live in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

 with their two children. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre

Centre Georges Pompidou

Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...

, Musee d’Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and Austrian National Archive. To supplement his income, Scher creates and directs commercials for HBO, HBO Family, PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

, Nick Jr, Ameritek, International Film Festival and the Sundance Channel. He also teaches graduate courses and at the School of Visual Arts

School of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...

 and plans to begin as an instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts

Tisch School of the Arts is one of the 15 schools that make up New York University ....

 Kanbar Institute of Film & Television’s Animation program in the fall of 2008.

Film Methodology

As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights, abstractions and visual effects

Visual effects

Visual effects are the various processes by which imagery is created and/or manipulated outside the context of a live action shoot. Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage and generated imagery to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly, or...

 all paired with music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 to create experimental short films. His films have been described as animated still life

Still life

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...

 as they are made from various drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s in which the images change to trigger responses within the human mind. He uses his paintings and collages by overlapping the colors and textures

Texture (painting)

Texture in painting is the look and feel of the canvas. It is based on the paint, and its application, or the addition of materials such as ribbon, metal, wood, lace, leather and sand. The concept of 'painterliness' also has bearing on texture. The texture stimulates two different senses; sight...

 to seem as if they are in fact “moving” in a hypnotic fashion. Images of influential behaviorists, Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, best known for developing a projective test known as the Rorschach inkblot test. This test was reportedly designed to reflect unconscious parts of the personality that "project" onto the stimuli...

 and Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself but was a mathematician and actually had strong distaste for the field....

, appear in some of his films. The films are highly irrational in their juxtapositions

Random juxtaposition

Random juxtaposition refers to the stimulation of creativity in problem solving, design or other creative pursuit by confronting two unrelated concepts or objects, usually the goal or problem to be solved on the one hand and a randomly selected object or concept on the other. Similar to an oxymoron....

, but this is the intention of the filmmaker. Scher wants his viewers to create their own stories from the visuals he provides. Films such as All the Wrong Reasons seek to create of feeling of dreaming

Dream

Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, philosophical intrigue and religious...

. One should have a sense of dreaming while awake

Awake

Wakefulness is a daily recurring brain state and state of consciousness in which an individual is conscious and engages in a coherent cognitive and behavior responses to the external world such as communication, ambulation, nutritional ingestion and procreation...

 and a connection to the subconscious mind

Subconscious

The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....

.

Scher’s abstract films are all approximately two and a half minutes long. He feels that this amount of time is more than enough to allow the viewer to become engaged. Although digital tools

Digital art

Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...

 are cheaper and faster for creating film, Scher prefers vintage machinery and technologies to create his image-rich films to effectively affect the senses. He uses the rotoscopic technique which involves projecting film frame

Film frame

In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture...

s on to paper and then tracing

Tracing

Tracing may refer to:* Tracing , a process by which a one demonstrates the ownership of property, with the intent to be awarded a claim based on this information...

them by hand. After this, the paper images are animated by separately shooting each sheet as a single frame.

Films

• Aria Striata (1980)

• Reasons To Be Glad (1980)

• “Prisoners of Inertia”: full length film that Scher both wrote and directed (1989)

• Milk of Amnesia (1992)

• Garden of Regrets (1994)

• Four Letter Heaven (1995)

• Nerve Tonic (1995)

• Trigger Happy (1997)

• Yours (1997)

• Shorts International Film Festival Trailers (1997/98)

• Bang Bang (1998)

• SID (1998)

• Turkish Trailer (1998)

• Postcards From Warren (1998)

• Grand Central (1999)

• You Won’t Remember This (2002)

• Spin Cycle (2003)

• Still Loaf with Guitar (2003)

• Lost and Found (2004)

• Tick Tock (2005)

• Coke Girl (2005)

• Woman on the Beach (2005)

• Memento Mickey (2005)

• Oxygen (2006)

• Paper View (2007)

• White Out (2007)

• L’eau Life (2007)

• Tulips (2008)

• All the Wrong Reasons (2008)

External links

• Jeff Scher Web site