Jeff Scher’s Remains to Be Seen Shot in Green-Wood Cemetery

Check out Jeff Scher’s special Halloween animation, Remains To Be Seen, which was filmed in Green-Wood Cemetery. It is part of the NY Times series, The Animated LIfe. Here’s Jeff on the cemetery of his inspiration:

"A great cemetery feels like a world
unto itself: a kind of theme park of the departed, where everyday life
is left behind at the gate. A certain mood overtakes you when you
visit. You are simultaneously overwhelmed by the sense of being
surrounded by the dead, and seduced by the beauty of the place. This
creates a special flavor of melancholy, the inevitable feels present
and one’s own life all the more fleeting — as in Memento mori, “Remember that you are mortal.”

"Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where this was filmed, is home
to approximately 600,000 former (or permanent) New Yorkers, and was a
popular tourist attraction in the 19th century. Wherever you turn, you
are confronted by bigger-than-life angels, huge pillars topped with
stone carved urns or orbs representing departed souls, and countless
carved headstones and elaborate mausoleums (many bigger than apartments
I’ve lived in). Confronted by so many lives that have been lived,
speaking to you in memorial marble and granite, you feel the presence
of human history. It is a stunning oasis of timeless green and
Victorian dreams of eternity in the heart of Brooklyn. Only the passing
planes remind you what century you’re in.

"With this film, I tried to capture that special cemetery mood in the
form and spirit of a Danse Macabre. Shay Lynch composed the
appropriately haunting score. I wanted my cast to consist exclusively
of the memorial statuary. The over-the-top quality of these realistic
representations of grief and faith ultimately inspired me to make this
Halloween Valentine to them."