Warning: This story is potentially useless, save for all of the great links it allows me to share.
A customer called
Facets one day asking about some old school animation films. He was from New York, either knew or worked with Jeff, or mentioned his name at least. I became curious to see what kinds of films he'd made but must have been cut short or gotten sidetracked (that never happens, honestly) and stopped my search abruptly.
Today, I received my periodic email newsletter from a film distributor called
Re:Voir. I noticed that they had posted some Stan Brakhage films on
their blog and decided to check it out. I watched the Brakhage stuff for a bit, then began scrolling around the page. Just below the Brakhage films was a clip of a Jeff Scher video, apparently taken from his most current release,
A Year in the Animated Life. I watched it and googled the name again. I came upon a running column in the
New York Times online. On this site, several of his movies are posted and he's posted some of his own commentary on them. One of them looked familiar, and I knew I'd seen it before (at least in part) somewhere else. I clicked the link to
Jeff's webpage, and saw the words, "
Reasons To Be Glad". I knew it was familiar and clicked on it. It took me to Jeff's blogspot page. It all made sense. Jeff Scher was the person through whom I originally found the posting of Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. film (the very first post on my little blog) and whose blog I've been watching (apparently not very closely) for some time!
Jeff's Animation is great and his New York homage film,
NYC certainly stands tall next to Thompson's.
