Jeff Scher shorts

Was in the mood for some Jeff Scher after running through my Len Lye DVD… watched the rest of the shorts on his great Reasons To Be Glad collection and searched around for more. Also a sweet film festival trailer and a 10-minute Pip Chodorov doc about Scher’s techniques. Jeff rotoscopes, using sort of a low-powered film projector on pause and tracing the projected image, with diffent color schemes on each frame. He says he spent up to an hour per frame on Garden of Regrets. Started using less labor-intensive techniques for Yours, combining different film images and rotating color techniques. Fun to take stills from these while watching because you never know what you’ll get.


Postcards from Warren (1998)

Cuts between different hilarious postcards from Warren (Sonbert, I assume), panning across some.


Bang Bang (1998)

Drums and flickering ink blots. My eyes were tired from a long week at work, and this was just the thing to hit their reset button, making them much better or worse – I can’t tell. The kind of thing that makes me wish I had a movie theater to show it in.

This one looks like Donnie Darko:


Sid (1998)

Playing with the dog from the rubber-steak’s-eye-view, complete with Eugene-in-Bob’s-Burgers-style dog-bark-sampling keyboard music.


Turkish Traffic (1998)

All flickering, transforming shapes and patterns set to (Turkish, I assume) happy horn music.


Garden of Regrets (1994)

More rapid rotoscoping magic, shots from a wide variety of sources, sometimes repeated later in the montage.


Pretty, Dead (2010)

Noirish scenes given the roto-color treatment, with a dramatic string score.


More reasons to be glad: Scher has an iBook with videos which I need to order, more movies online (including a live video of Toog) and a blog series at NY Times.