Prisoners of Inertia

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

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

“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

An animated short film created by the artist Jeff Scher.

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.

During the years preceeding his death, Sonbert channeled his energy into making Whiplash. His vision and motor skills impaired, he gave his companion, Ascension Serrano, detailed instructions about the assembly of specific shots and the music to be used as a counterpoint to the images. Before his death in 1995, he asked filmmaker Jeff Scher (a former student of Sonbert's at Bard) to complete the film. --Jon Gartenberg. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Estate Project for Artists with AIDS in 1996.

"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.

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.

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.

The watercolor-painted animated short depicts an Ancient Aztec human sacrifice.