As part of Sightlines, a TimesSelect visual series, filmmaker Jeff Scher created a filmic homage to Grand Central Station and its commuters. It’s quite beautiful. The music is by Shay Lynch.
The are other films by Scher at the Times’. The artist’s portrait of his son, from birth to the age of four is also gorgeous. Music
composed by Sam Bisbee.
Jeff Scher is a New York-based filmmaker, who defines himself not as an animator, but as a painter working in motion. He is fascinated by the human mind’s ability to create the illusion of movement from disparate images. His montages are dizzying arrays of color, light, figures and forms that flit about like unruly thoughts, tricking the eye and revealing unexpected visual harmonies.
Scher gave up his pre-med studies for film while at Bard College in the mid-1970s. He still makes use of rotoscoping, an old animation technique in which film frames are blown up and traced individually onto animation cels. In Scher’s case, he painstakingly hand paints and shoots each frame of film, sometimes substituting clay, paper models or found materials for his paintings.
His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d’Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and the Austrian National Film Archive.
The link is wrong and TimesSelect was discontinued a few weeks ago. In other words, a typical morning of wrong info on OTBKB.