Aérobie

A jazzy film in which the spectator is forced to look with the ears and listen with the eyes. An abstract film drawn directly on the computer.

[The] Insinuation of accidentally spilled ink that would be running across the paper in random, aleatory oozes displaces the graceful liquidity of the careful animated choreography. - William Moritz

A deep dive into a snowstorm of structural chaos and a blizzard of exploding gestural animation.

A film about uncanny valleys and the space between. Painted 16mm film undergoes a monstrous transformation becoming neither analog nor digital.

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.

The very first film in which Maya Yonesho tried to show her thoughts. Even just circles may be able to show emotions as a person in animation. The main circle (character) is slightly pinker than the other grey circles (people) and she thought she was very special. But she is very grey in a colourful world. She will find out that grey is not just a boring colour.

Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.

Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.

Lulu the dog gets a job at the local convenience store and stays up all night cleaning the back room. Short created for Adult Swim Smalls.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.

Hand painted directly onto film stock by Margaret Tait, this film features animated dancing figures, accompanied by authentic calypso music.

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

Two Space systematically explores symmetries used by Islamic artists to create abstract temple decorations. The two dimensional patterns, like the tile patterns of Islamic temples, are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translations, rotations, and reflections) upon a basic figure or tile. Two Space consists of twelve such patterns produced using each of nine different animating figures (12 x 9 = 108 total). Rendered in stark black and white, the patterns produce optical illusions of figure-ground reversal and afterimages of color. Gamelan music from the classical tradition of Java adds to the mesmerizing effect.

Sixteen 'objects', each consisting of one hundred points of light, perform a series of precisely choreographed rhythmic transformations. Accompanied by the sound of a Shakuhachi (the Japanese bamboo flute), the film is an exercise in the visual perception of motion and mathematical structure.

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

A mathematical play on one repeated movement. It imparts a sense of possibilities: that something simple can produce complex and unexpected patterns. As with an atom, the variety of possibilities from a base movement is potentially infinite.

"Mouris’s film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.” - Yale

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.