Light Work I

Home-video footage of infants playing transforms into an experimental display of rotoscope animation.

Rain Dance is a four-minute animation produced by Hill while an undergraduate student at Harvard University from 1988-1992; the exact date of the production is currently unidentified. Although little known, the film is representative of both Hill’s do-it yourself approach – employing character cutouts, strong, yet playful colors, and a narrative and technical simplicity rich with charm – and her jovial demeanor and inquisitive approach to life. The film is dedicated to Elijah Aron, Hill’s boyfriend throughout college. Aron remained close friends with Helen and her husband Paul Gailiunas, and was the godfather of their son Francis.

Inspired by a poem.

A man visits the world's smallest fair, where he learns a valuable lesson about life and poison cotton candy.

A whimsical lesson in love from Helen Hill.

Helen Hill remembers her grandfather just before his death (in part) by a metaphor involving him as a rapidly diminishing mouse.

Madame Winger wants you to make a film about something you love. She shows you her favorite low budget filmmaking techniques, from cameraless animation to processing your own film in a bathtub. Filmed in 16 mm.

A tribute to Halifax.

Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, colour and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalogue of catalogues remembers a tactile economy.

'Tie-dye' film study. Psychedelic patterns and colours mix on the various materials then explode onto the retina. The 16mm material perfectly captures the details of the materials.

A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Mesmerising RGB bling-bling for the cinema, featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.

Eye candy as a special treat. Let Your Light Shine is the ultimate Spectrum Short film, a photokinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. A work in the tradition of the absolute animation film of the 1930s, which requires prismatic glasses to achieve the maximum result.

The Tortoise composed a song and the Lion cub learnt it by heart and they sang it together.

A romantic story between two wool skeins.

The Care Bears team up with a troubled brother and sister who just moved to a new town to help a neglected young magician's apprentice whose evil spell book causes sinister things to happen.

Anita the duck buys a psychic device at a novelty store in an alternate universe and creates mayhem at a crazy party.

The last habitants of a village refuse to let themselves sink into oblivion.

Silhouette film. Based on Bizet’s opera “Carmen”.

A lonely fisherman drifts into haunted waters in search of food and finds much more than he bargained for. Based on an Inuit folktale.

A seven-year-old girl longs for a bicycle so that she can be more like the other kids in her Norwegian town, but her embarrassingly unconventional, modernist architect parents see things differently. Academy Award-winning animator Torill Kove weaves memory and fantasy together in this droll and charming look at the pain of childhood alienation.