Alex Animate 2D

Video by Alex Sniderman “Rearview Mirror” Composed, Performed, Arranged, Produced by Alex Sniderman © & ℗ 2026 Alex Sniderman/No Accidents Music/Firing Squad Published by Lust Object Music, BMI All Rights Reserved

I found this piece a bit challenging to take in. It was true information overload—hyper reality certainly, though hyper consumerism might be more accurate. Turning a grocery shopping expedition into a video game/online shopping excursion complete with an overlay of augmented reality touchscreen options and communication with customer service reps through video calls was completely overwhelming. I wasn’t always sure where to look as everything was vying for the attention of your senses. This piece was very effective if the goal was to scramble the viewer’s capacity for observation. Between the vibrant colors, the video game sound effects, incidental music, the AR graphic overlays turning the world into a giant touchscreen, and my lack of understanding of any more than basic Spanish, concentrating on any one thing was difficult. Clearly Juliana Restrepo was overwhelmed by her tasks and simply existing in this hyper-reality. As an illustration of modern work and consumerism, it’s disturbing, and disturbingly effective.

It’s probably not going to surprise anyone to learn that I’m a huge fan of John Lennon. I found John Lennon: In His Own Words, a collection of his interviews in a bargain bin at a mall when I was about 12 and basically memorized it. Those attitudes he espoused formed and informed many of my own. Aside from my feelings about the interviewee, this animation is really wonderful, reflecting the conversation through Raskin’s images. It’s a beautiful call and response with Raskin’s visuals reflecting and refracting Lennon’s replies and reminds me a lot of the way Terry Gilliam’s images transition into each other. Raskin’s animation flows as naturally as Lennon’s words. One small illustration of this process is from 3:57 to 3:59 as Lennon notes “I write it,” as an illustration of a pencil squirts a cloud of ink, “record it,” as the ink is absorbed by a microphone, “and play it” as the microphone is revealed to be sitting on top of a turntable, and a hand appears on the right side of the screen. The index finger of said hand presses a button on the side of the turntable, which starts the platter turning and the tone arm moves over as if playing a real record, though oddly there isn’t one on the turntable. The cleverness and the love in this piece really touched me, and is something I want to incorporate into my own work.

“I Have Dreamed Of You So Much” by Emma Vakarelova struck me as both tender and seductive. The obsessive longing in the narrative is perfectly paired with the beauty and richness of the images. As a whole, the film reminded me of David Lynch’s idea of film as moving paintings. Initially a painter, Lynch got interested in film because he wanted to make his paintings move. This moving painting concept perfectly encapsulates “I Have Dreamed Of You So Much.” The combination of the plethora of vivid colors, the majesty of the extremely well-matched music, the humanity exuding from the character drawings, and the simultaneously gentle and overwhelming longing of the narrative combine to make a film about the compulsion of longing for love that exudes undeniable beauty. As much as the sonic elements of the music and narration raise the emotional pitch, “I Have Dreamed Of You So Much” would still be beautifully compelling as a silent film.

After spending a long time on visuals that communicated the ideas in something of a nonlinear way, I added an image of the actual text, and recorded a voiceover to convey specific information about Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Coupled with some audio from a composition of mine which used the synthesized sound of bullets and guitar feedback grafted onto the melody of the Presidential hymn “Hail To The Chief” along with an exclamation by the current White House Occupant, my hope is that both the information included in the 25th Amendment as well as the challenging and surreal political situation we are currently experiencing are communicated in a way that’s both instructional and humorous.

A little cutout animation.

Through the use of the medium of animation, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights video communicates the exact information usually presented in a document form  (i.e. The Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights) in a much simpler and more impactful way. By nature, animation is a time-based tool, and so ensures that ideas are conveyed one at a time and flow into each other. This allows the audience to absorb a great amount of information in many small pieces over the four minutes and thirty one seconds of the piece. The inclusion of not only the text of the original document, but supporting images and music, allows the inherent gravity of this assembly of ideas to be communicated clearly and simply. There is not a lot of color variation or extraneous graphics to take away from the ideas in the document, resulting in a strong and clear presentation. For example, the sentence “Every man, woman, and child on Earth is born free…” beginning at the 0:08 second mark and lasting until 0:20, is written in black text on a tan background with added animated images of a man morphing into a woman, the image of a child, followed by a spinning earth illustration, and finally a flock of birds that fly off in time with the word free appearing, all pulled along with a mid-tempo guitar and drum motif marching in time with the animation. Though the choices used to illustrate the subjects of this particular sentence might seem overly obvious, they serve the piece by literally illustrating each of the words in the text, and conveying its ideas concisely, without confusion to communicate that the right of freedom is guaranteed to every human being on the planet. A weighty idea that’s simply brought to the audience via animation through text, image, and sound.

The sounds were collected from YouTube and freesound.org. I edited them to fit the timeline, and layered them to convey the feeling of riding on the downhill slope into Manhattan.

I very much appreciated the rhythm of the visuals and the sound in Ryoji Ikeda's piece The Transfinite. My definition of a song is one I’ve come to after years of my own work as a songwriter as well as studying the work of others, and boils down a song as a marriage of words and music. This piece evoked a similar familiarity. While unlike a typical popular song, this work doesn’t have a traditional narrative structure per se, the visual rhythms and audio do tell a story in an abstract way, and contrary to many longer narrative songs, the ever changing structure of The Transfinite never drags. I also think both elements of this piece could work independently as either a sound composition or strictly visual installation. The rhythm of the work is creates an abstract narrative structure in which the visual element is supported by the audio, and vice versa, and although, as mentioned above, I think both pieces could be successful on their own, together they exhibit as much a marriage of the visual and auditory as the words and music do in a well constructed song, and the combination of both audio and visual making up The Transfinite really packs a punch. While it may be both blindingly obvious to state as well as a tired cliché, often a good rule of thumb with any kind of creative work is less is more, and a simple expression of vision can be the most effective artistic statement, with The Transfinite, I think the opposite is true. More is definitely more in this case.

This piece is so clever—it really shows how animation can sometimes convey a story much more convincingly than a live action film. There’s an ineffable quality that animation as a medium lends to any story, and this piece is a great example. The still images and montages as well as the herky jerky movement of all the elements could all certainly have been done much more smoothly and possibly “professionally” with live action, but the rough hand drawn images and jagged cutouts in this piece complements the edges in the story itself. The idea of “legal” smuggling is of course, morally questionable, and Choy’s risky solution to getting her six cartons of cigarettes across the border by wrapping them in her scarf is perfectly illustrated by the quality of these images and the shakiness of animation. The outlandishness and outlaw nature of the story lends itself perfectly to its visual representation.

Emily Dickinson, Nobody, After Effects Titles

The first couple times I watched these titles, I had the sound on and was distracted by Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score which complements the action so incredibly well. Then I watched without the sound and was struck by the fact that it was impossible to view any of the action in this intro without thinking about the ideas of shape and direction. North and Northwest are of course, both directions, and the titles themselves are animated and moving onto and off the background, which was at the time a new and cutting edge technique. Bass initially uses a green background with a series of blue lines running vertically and diagonally across the screen, creating a grid that fills the screen, suggesting both direction and movement. I thought it ironic that while the vertical gridlines run north/south, the diagonal lines run northeast/southwest, neither of which is northwest. In fact, Bass’s choices of diagonal directions are mirror images of northwest/southeast which might make more sense in keeping with the theme of the title, but my guess is that it might have proved making the titles themselves harder to read, which is why he chose lines running northeast/southwest. Regardless of Bass’s artistic license, his work is extremely effective, creating anticipation and tension in the viewer, which combined with Herrmann’s score, makes the viewer anxious to experience the film. Bass’s use of shape and movement are as brilliant as Herrmann’s music, pulling the viewer into Hitchcock’s bustling vision of the New York rat race as his grid transforms into the side of a glass and steel midtown skyscraper, then into crowd scenes with people competing for cabs, hustling into the subway, and in the case of Hitchcock himself in one of his trademark cameos, having that quintessential New York commuter’s moment of having the bus (or subway) doors close in one’s face. 

I don’t really have any criticism of it. I feel like it works really well. And as I previously stated that with this choice of music, especially in the early part of this clip where it’s such a robust and fierce in your face kind of jazz, that it shows just how much confidence Smith has in these images and the way that he’s put them together that the music is in no way overshadowing the visual. I love this stuff.

I used Anticipation when showing the dime following fish spin #2, as well as when the fish is eating the coins in preparation for the spin/change making—especially the dimes. It could also be argued that I utilized staging when the showing the dime and the dollar, because I wanted to direct the audience to my hand where the dime was. Then to be sure they could read the dollar, I made a point of turning it right side up and lingering on it for a split second before ending. And the music is a favorite, Dr. John’s rendition of the New Orleans Mardi Gras classic “Big Chief.” I hope you are amused!

Alex_Sniderman_Rotoscope.mp4

All three pieces are very effective in communicating emotional resonance through visual poetry, without the necessity of a traditional narrative storyline.