Jeff Scher (born December 24, 1954) is an American

filmmaker Filmmaking or film production is the process by which a Film, motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, beginning with an initial story, idea, or commission. Production then continues through screen ...

animator An animator is an artist who creates images, known as frames, which give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, and video games. Animat ...

and

painter Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

Biography

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

Bard College Bard College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains within the Hudson River Historic District ...

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

Westport, CT Westport is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. Located in the Gold Coast along the Long Island Sound, it is northeast of New York City and is part of the Western Connecticut Planning Region. Westport's public school syst ...

with their two

children A child () is a human being between the stages of childbirth, birth and puberty, or between the Development of the human body, developmental period of infancy and puberty. The term may also refer to an unborn human being. In English-speaking ...

Buster and Oscar. His work is in the permanent collections of

the Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...

, Academy Film Archives,

Hirshhorn Museum The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed ...

Pompidou Centre The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

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

commercials A television advertisement (also called a commercial, spot, break, advert, or ad) is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization. It conveys a message promoting, and aiming to market, a product, service or idea. ...

for

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

HBO Family Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based ...

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first ca ...

Nick Jr. Channel The Nick Jr. Channel, sometimes shortened to Nick Jr., is an American pay television, pay television channel owned by the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. An offshoot of Nickelodeon ...

, Ameritek,

International Film Festival A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually annually and in a single city or region. Some film festivals show films outdoors or online. Films may be of recent date and depe ...

and the Sundance Channel. He also teaches graduate courses and at the

School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by Silas ...

and plans to begin as an instructor at NYU

Tisch School of the Arts The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic, and media arts school of New York University. Founded on August 17, 1965, as the School of the Arts at New York University, Tisch ...

Kanbar Institute of Film & Television’s Animation program in the fall of 2008.New York Times
/ref> In 2001 Scher received the

Creative Capital Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has co ...

Award in the discipline of Moving Image. He also won a

Creative Arts Emmy Award The Creative Arts Emmys are a class of Emmy Awards presented in recognition of technical and other similar achievements in American television programming. They are commonly awarded to behind-the-scenes personnel such as production designers, ...

for his production design on the HBO documentary ''

The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm ''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' ...

''.

Film Methodology

As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights,

abstractions Abstraction is a process where general rules and concepts are derived from the use and classifying of specific examples, literal ( real or concrete) signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An abstraction" is the outcome of this process ...

and

visual effects Visual effects (sometimes abbreviated as VFX) is the process by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live-action shot in filmmaking and video production. The integration of live-action footage and other live-action fo ...

all paired with

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

to create experimental

short films A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film o ...

. His films have been described as animated

still life A still life (: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, human-m ...

as they are made from various

drawing Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...

s in which the images change to trigger responses within the

human mind The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, ...

. He uses his paintings and

collages Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

by overlapping the colors and textures to seem as if they are in fact “moving” in a hypnotic fashion. Images of influential

behaviorists Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that indivi ...

Hermann Rorschach Hermann Rorschach (; 8 November 1884 – 2 April 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the ...

and

Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (, ; 27 February 1936) was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs. Pavlov also conducted significant research on ...

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

dream A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensation (psychology), sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around ...

ing. One should have a sense of dreaming while

awake Wakefulness is a daily recurring brain state and state of consciousness in which an individual is conscious and engages in coherent cognitive and behavioral responses to the external world. Being awake is the opposite of being asleep, in which ...

and a connection to the

subconscious mind In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness. The term was already popularized in the early 20th century in areas ranging from psychology, religion and spirituality. The concept was heavily popu ...

. 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 are cheaper and faster for creating film, Scher prefers vintage machinery and

technologies Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...

to create his image-rich films to effectively affect the

senses A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditionally identified as su ...

. He uses the rotoscopic technique which involves projecting

film frame In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a frame is one of the many '' still images'' which compose the complete ''moving picture''. The term is derived from the historical development of film stock, in which the sequentia ...

s on to paper and then tracing them by hand. After this, the paper images are animated by separately shooting each sheet as a single frame.

Films

* ''NYC'' (1976) * ''Reasons To Be Glad'' (1980) * ''Aria Striata'' (1985) * ''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) * ''Goodnight Moon'' (opening for an HBO special) (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)

Accolades

: Animation for ''

''Adjunct Jeff Scher wins Emmy-NYU-TISCH
/ref>

References

External links

Jeff Scher Web site

Scher's official YouTube channel

BTS: The Studio of Jeff Scher , The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm , HBO
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scher, Jeff 1954 births Living people Bard College alumni American animated film directors Primetime Emmy Award winners American experimental filmmakers