Jeff Scher
Jeff Scher (born December 24, 1954) is an American filmmaker, animator and painter.
Also recorded as Jeffrey Noyes Scher
Jeff Scher
- Born
- 1954
- Nationality
- United States
- Occupation
- animator · film director · filmmaker · painter
- Education
- Bard College
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Jeff Scher (born December 24, 1954) is an American filmmaker, animator and painter.
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Note VALÉORINE
Jeff Scher (born 1954) is an animator, film director and filmmaker, among other activities, of American nationality. The animator was educated at Bard College. Works are held at Harvard Film Archive and Museum of Modern Art.
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 26 September 2026
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In this article
Biography
Biography
Jeffery Noyes Scher was born on December 24, 1954. Scher graduated from Bard College in 1976. He is married to Bonnie Siegler and they currently live in Westport, CT with their two children Buster and Oscar. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d’Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and Austrian National Archive. To supplement his income, Scher creates and directs commercials for HBO, HBO Family, PBS, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr. Channel, Ameritek, International Film Festival and the Sundance Channel. He also teaches graduate courses and at the School of Visual Arts and plans to begin as an instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Kanbar Institute of Film & Television’s Animation program in the fall of 2008. In 2001 Scher received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Moving Image. He also won a Creative Arts Emmy Award for his production design on the HBO documentary The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm.
Accolades
Accolades
• Creative Arts Emmy Award: Animation for The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm
Film Methodology
As an underground filmmaker, Scher uses lights, abstractions and visual effects all paired with music to create experimental short films. His films have been described as animated still life as they are made from various drawings in which the images change to trigger responses within the human mind. He uses his paintings and collages by overlapping the colors and textures to seem as if they are in fact “moving” in a hypnotic fashion. Images of influential behaviorists, Hermann Rorschach and Ivan Pavlov, 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 dreaming. One should have a sense of dreaming while awake and a connection to the subconscious mind. 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 to create his image-rich films to effectively affect the senses. He uses the rotoscopic technique which involves projecting film frames 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)
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Times Square Arts. Jeff Scher.
- 2.Cups Conference.com. Jeff Scher.
- 3.Z Animation.
- 4.New York Times.
- 5.Creative Capital. creative-capital.org.
- 6.Juried Animation Winners Announced For 70th Emmy Awards-Cartoon Brew
- 7.Emmys
- 8.Eye Magazine | Feature | the alchemist.
- 9.Heller, Steven. Animator Jeff Scher uses dense, unorthodox techniques to make his highly original, image-rich films. Eye Magazine.
- 10.Bowen, Peter. Private Audience. Filmmaker Magazine.
- 11.Canyon Cinema.
- 12.Re:Voir
- 13.Lumen Eclipse.
- 14.New York Times.
- 15.Creative Capital Channel.
- 16.Chodorov, Pip. Jeff Scher In His Own Words. Festival Catalogue. 2007-10-01.
- 17.Encyclopedia.com
- 18.New York Times.
- 19.New York Times.
- 20.New York Times.
- 21.New York Times.
- 22.Adjunct Jeff Scher wins Emmy-NYU-TISCH
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
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Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolved
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 18 September 2026.
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