White Out

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.

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

“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.

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.

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

Jeff Scher's 2013 ode to underground public transport.

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

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.

"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 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.

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

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.

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