Losing Pace

An animated short film from 1987 that deals with the incarceration of a man in a dark cell from where there is no escape.

In the modern village of the future, everything is mechanized, but the dreams of the village musician remain the same. He wants to become an artist. Thanks to the fact that an Art Nouveau goddess gave him a helping hand, Janko Muzykant saves his life and escapes from the village on a Pegasus.

On a small Kalahari farm things look bleak. It hasn't rained for ages and the well has run dry and the residents are just about hanging on with what little they have. As the farmers' daughter prepares to gamble on the final few seeds they have left something appears on the horizon which could be the salvation they have been praying for.

This lavishly embellished, comically operetta CGI fantasy story takes place in the Indian Ocean, where a flock of “piranha birds” has settled on the back of an octopus. When an octopus is starved, it feeds on birds on its back, but because it is already threatened with extinction, they decide to send a bottle across the sea with a call for help.

“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

2-minute animation film to music by John Coltrane.

A futuristic cruise ship with a crew of robots is ready to take its first flight. A boy follows his curious dog on board of the ship, but then the ship takes off. The robots sees the boy as a blind passenger and try to get him off the flying ship.

A six minute short made in New York City by Jeffrey Noyes Scher.

A simplistically rendered girl screams and cries, and her environment changes to reflect her thoughts and mood.

Just before supper, Daddy asks his young daughter to take her bath, which is not as easy as pie.

A mysterious knock in an instant destroys the usual life that four lonely, calm people lead.