Chaisson: Rise of the Zerad

“Trigger Happy” was made with hundreds of objects found on the streets and sidewalks of New York. It began as an attempt to make an animated ballet, but as I was shooting the dance turned rowdy, into more of a nocturnal revel. It was shot on a lightbox with high-contrast film. The backlight silhouetted the objects, making them into graphic icons of themselves. The resulting film is a negative, which turned the objects white and the background black as asphalt. It makes the dance almost phantasmagoric. The trigger I was happy about was on the camera, but the title also fits the velocity of the imagery. Much of the animation happens by the rapid replacement of one object with another. It’s the afterimage in your eyes that animates the difference between the shapes, as one is replaced by another, and another… The music by Shay Lynch perfectly captures the idea of dancing in the streets.” —Jeffrey Noyes Scher

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.

New York City: the Wonderland that never sleeps and for Alice, the City offers an easy opportunity for a beautiful, wealthy, twenty-something girl with little responsibility or direction in life, to get lost in the endless nights of booze, drugs and parties with fabulous people. However, on this particular night, the city will show its dark side, filled with scoundrels and lunacy. On this particular night, Alice will see what she is likely to become if she continues this pattern of sleeping all day and partying all night.

One day at a holiday home for the disabled in Hammerdal, Jämtland, depicted in clay animation and with authentic sound from the home that the film tells about. Various episodes show everyday events and relationships between the old ones who have lent their voices and characters to the movie figures. The film shows how an ordinary day looks like meals, mail delivery, card games and visits to the Salvation Army. In the end, the real people compare and comment on their characters.

A greedy King Midas is visited one day by a mysterious visitor who grants him the ability to turn all things he touches to gold. He learns his lesson when the food he tries to eat and his own daughter are turned to gold as well. The visitor reappears and offers him the opportunity to return to his old self, which he gladly does.

Traditional clay-mation and stop-motion animated film.

The story takes place entirely on a kitchen counter and sees two slices of raw meat as protagonists. The first slice is courted by the second and together they dance to the notes of a recording from the 1920s broadcast on the radio, after which the two slices find themselves playing and flirting on a plate full of flour, but the passion is abruptly interrupted by two skewers who fork the two slices and fry them in a pan.

A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare- no matter how twisted or odd that way must be. A memorably bizarre screen version of Lewis Carroll’s novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’.

A very free adaptation of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus', Goethe's 'Faust' and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A nondescript man is lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, where he finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay animation and giant puppets.

In this early stop-motion film by Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, a device consisting of a clock, a pendulum, a faucet and a bucket enacts a series of events whenever the clock chimes.

At the end of the eighth day the Creator has taken refuge in a dark dungeon . Obsessed with transcending he manipulates life to the extreme and tries to engender the perfect being that will immortalize him