Jeff Scher is a

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

-based

filmmaker Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, castin ...

animator An animator is an artist who creates multiple 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 gam ...

and

painter Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

. He was born Jeffery Noyes Scher, 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, and is within the Hudson River Historic ...

in 1976. He is married to

Bonnie Siegler Bonnie Siegler (born 1963) is a New York-based graphic designer. Life She is the founder of the design studio Eight and a Half and, before that, co-founded the design studio Number Seventeen in 1993. Her clients include Participant Media, Late N ...

and they currently live in

Westport, CT Westport is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, along the Long Island Sound within Connecticut's Gold Coast. It is northeast of New York City. The town had a population of 27,141 according to the 2020 U.S. Census. History ...

with their two

children A child ( : children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty, or between the developmental period of infancy and puberty. The legal definition of ''child'' generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger ...

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. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of the ...

, Academy Film Archives,

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

Pompidou Centre The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area 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 television commercial, TV commercial, commercial, spot, television spot, TV spot, advert, television advert, TV advert, television ad, TV ad or simply an ad) is a span of television programming produce ...

for

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, 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 ba ...

HBO Family Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, 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 ba ...

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (often shortened to Nick) is an American pay television television channel, channel which launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children. It is run by Paramount Global through its List of assets owned by Param ...

Nick Jr. Nick Jr. (known on-air as the Nick Jr. Channel) is an American pay television channel spun off from Nickelodeon's long-running programming block of the same name. It is run by Paramount Global through its networks division's Kids and Family Gr ...

, Ameritek,

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

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 ...

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, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the a ...

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 commi ...

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, set ...

for his production design on the HBO documentary '' The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm''.

Film Methodology

As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights,

abstractions Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or "concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An abstr ...

and

visual effects Visual effects (sometimes abbreviated 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 foota ...

all paired with

music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

to create experimental

short films A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...

. His films have been described as animated

still life A still life (plural: 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, m ...

as they are made from various

drawing Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, ...

s in which the images change to trigger responses within the

human mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

. He uses his paintings and

collages Collage (, from the french: coller, "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 assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

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 understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual' ...

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 s ...

and

Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ( rus, Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов, , p=ɪˈvan pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈpavləf, a=Ru-Ivan_Petrovich_Pavlov.ogg; 27 February 1936), was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist, psychologist and physiol ...

, 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 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 5 to 20 minutes, althou ...

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. Scholarly use of the term The word ''subconscious'' represents an anglicized version of the French ''subconscient'' as coined in 1889 by the psycho ...

. 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 knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

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 world through the detection of stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the central nervous system rec ...

. 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 '' The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm'' 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 animators American animated film directors Primetime Emmy Award winners American experimental filmmakers