More From Life

Morphs from the daily ephemera of life.

2009, 9 minutes, 6017 index cards.
Original music by Howard Kaufman, Bryan Osper and Nick Pires-Moore.

Palm Springs International ShortFest BEST ANIMATED SHORT at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival Black Maria Film & Video Festival Melbourne International Animation Festival Anonimul Film Festival Starz Denver Film Festival Landlocked Film Festival Minneapolis Underground Film Festival Santa Fe Film Festival Atlanta Film Festival

Artist's Statement

For many years I have kept a simple, visual diary of daily drawings, each one no larger than a square on a very small calendar. Browsing back through the months and years is fun because you don't have to ready anything, just look at the tiny drawings and memories come popping forth. One year, instead of a small calendar, I decided to make this film by doing my daily drawings on index cards. And, instead of doing the drawings at the end of the day from memory, these drawings would all be from life. Drawing from life gives the viewer, or artist, a uniquely vivid memory of the subject. I looked around my world each day that year, searching for my subject. Often it was something insignificant and very ordinary; other times it was the highlight of the day.

More From Life is visual music, a celebration of the mundane ephemera of daily life and how, in one's memory, these things run together, overlap and morph into each other and into other things as well. Also, it is a record of some of the moments in my life that, without this film, would have been long forgotten.

In memory, when you look back at all of the millions of little things that fill up your days, they tend to blur and distort, sometimes changing the meaning, significance, or lack of it. In my film, the daily ephemera literally morphs, blurs and transforms from one drawing to the next. New meanings are created when one drawing becomes another. It happens very fast, so my hope is that some of it will stick in your brain and, later, come back as a memory of your own.