Al Jarnow

Documentary about the experimental animator.

Things you can do with a single sheet of paper.

Words that start with the letter O, P, and R. A typographic animation.

Mixed animation set to music.

The letter X in various typefaces.

The letter Z in various typefaces.

Words that end in -ake and start with ch-. A typographic animation.

Kids recycle household objects to make a miniature city.

A rap teaching kids how to use a waste basket.

Kids rapping about the number 17.

Twenty animators from the U.S., Switzerland, Poland and China express their friendship with and love of animation in a series of animated variations on the standard countdown.

Experimental computer imagery

A method by which drawings can be enlarged on a grid.

A rock performs an acrobatic feat for the assembled crowd.

Beginning with his work for a certain public television show that featured a big yellow bird, Al Jarnow captured life's scientific minutia and boiled it down for easy consumption between cookie eating monsters and counting vampires. Coupling time-lapse, stop motion, and cell animation with simple objects found in every day life, Jarnow deconstructed the world for an entire generation.

Shells create intricate patterns in this short stop-motion animation.

Beach sand transforms into a lush tree-scattered landscape.

Daylight moves through a room. Or is it the room that moves?

An animated orange

A parade of animated cats.

A seashell belonging to a northern moon snail twists and turns 360 degrees in multiple wooden homemade contraptions and through contact sheets at a progressively rapid pace, before finally synthesizing the gnomic growth of the spiral shell and exploring the phenomena of virtual and real space and time. Directed by Al Jarnow.

A stop motion opus made up of hundreds of hand-painted wooden blocks that takes the viewer through a brief history of architecture. Primitive structures evolve into larger buildings...

A train struggles to stay on track.

A story about cooperation.

Three rocks attempt to cross a river.

Shapes come to life on a pegboard.

Abstract geometric diagrams come to life.

A short film made of cel drawings, showing us how various mammals, plants and objects all share similar skeletal structures. Produced for Sesame Street.

For a year, Jarnow photographed and recorded the sounds of his newborn child.

A filmed exercise that follows in the path of Rotating Cubic Grid and Cubits, the predictably titled Cube features cubes of varying shapes and size sliding around and growing into and out of one another, demonstrating how multiple parts can make up a whole.

A companion piece to Cosmic Letter, also produced for 3-2-1 Contact. Jarnow begins at his address in Brooklyn and zooms outward to the farthest reaches of the universe.

A mind-twisting time-lapse beginning on a hill just outside town, doing for the concept of time what Charles and Ray Eames's 1968 film The Powers of Ten did for space. One billion years in two minutes.

Jarnow adapts an architectural grid catalogue of cubic rotations in order to explore a direct relationship between animation procedure and logical numerical operations. The film is as much the making of animation as it is a paper model of a computer. The cube sheet, upon which the film is based, is so constructed that a horizontal cubic rotation and a diagonal pan yields a diagonal rotation. Combinations of these primary moves result in more complex rotations throughout this awe inspiring film.

A group of kids demonstrate the concept of image resolution.

After a day of gathering hundreds of seashells and rocks from the beach, Jarnow uses the found objects to construct a stop motion commentary on how we look at nature through various cinematic techniques.

Jarnow regularizes a child's primitive sketch of a house into increasingly firmer architecture, showing how the same place might by rendered by different hands. Objects twist and turn, a drawing resolving into a wall painting, as the perspective shifts, boxes within boxes, until the viewer is back outside

In what would become a familiar theme throughout his carrer, Jarnow explores the earth from above, invoking Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion and the Gnomic map to illustrate different geometric and compromise projections.

Slated for inclusions on the Boston based Infinity Factory educational program alongside Map Projections, Digging to China explores a familiar childhood activity on a global scale.

When Jill Jarnow won a blue Volkswagon in a design contest, and named the car Wart after the young king Arthur in T.H.White's The Sword and the Stone - it naturally wasn't long before the iconic vehicle turned up in a film. Autosong unfolds on an autobahn of the mind, a road between the formalism of highway driving and the looped flipbook experiments.

The primary motif in this silent picture is a grid that controls the shapes and motions of forms contained within the framework of a rotating cube. Constructed from interlocking cycles, the film explores branches and loops along paths laid down by geometric logic.

Intended to be an "animation machine," Four Quadrant Exercise finds Jarnow adapting a perspective system, enabling him to render complex motions almost automatically. Created prior to the streamlined ease of computer software, this short is a commitment to the joy of making marks on paper.

Tondo introduces the cosmic formalism that was the primary theme of Al Jarnow's independent films. An infinite gridscape alternates with vibrating etchings, spirograms and other surreal realities.

Jarnow's first work for Sesame Street and the Children's Television Workshop - yak is a goofy take on the letter "Y."

A stream of consciousness experiment committed directly to celluloid, Jarnow pays homage to Stan Brakhage and Harry Smith. Abstract designs transform self portraiture, lettering tests and images traced from other films including a Charlie Chaplin short.

Short animation by Al Jarnow based on the work of British poet Edward Lear. Made at NYU.