Josh Shaffner

Psychedelic colours, shapes and music. In the dreams of a patient with severe burns, this film will take us on a surreal ride full of disturbing images. Care in a futuristic hospice is portrayed with a mesmerising style: a combination of CGI and classical drawing, titles and commentary as if taken from a sci-fi psychological handbook. 

Psychedelic colours, shapes and music. In the dreams of a patient with severe burns, this film will take us on a surreal ride full of disturbing images. Care in a futuristic hospice is portrayed with a mesmerising style: a combination of CGI and classical drawing, titles and commentary as if taken from a sci-fi psychological handbook.

Josh Shaffner made this pensive music video for American-Canadian singer Rufus Wainwright. The director used many elaborate backgrounds, alternating between black-and-white and colourful sequences. He also paid special attention to typography and sheets of paper floating in the air, accompanying us, along with the tones of a piano, throughout the whole music video.

Compound animation loops filmed on a single canvas depict an immensely playful, colourful and abstract whirlwind of various particles perfectly harmonised with Bach’s excellent composition. This one-minute-long abstract film in which Josh Shaffner made good use of his experience with painting was made at CalArts in a programme for experimental animation.

The disturbing and surreal, traditionally animated film Flaws depicts the intransigence of the labour process in which people are trapped, confined, psychologically tortured and denied of any hope of a free life. The author uses an extraordinary animation technique – all of the stages of animation in a given sequence are drawn on a single piece of paper.

A vision of Los Angeles from the perspective of a service industry worker is, in fact, a gloomy and towards the end also tragicomic story of this metropolis that doesn’t even try to hide its dark sides. This film was made at CalArts and Shaffner not only directed it, but also composed the score and engineered the sound.

A time-lapse oil-painting animated film about an insomniac guy and what he dreams when he finally falls asleep. In addition to atypical animation techniques, this conceptually daring film also uses enhanced naturalistic sound, making the protagonist’s insomnia even more unbearable and the whole film more disturbing.