Shari Gaynes
Los Angeles, California

citrus dreams

paper stop motion; 52 seconds; 2020

picnic

paper animation; 33 seconds; 2023

Two short films by Los Angeles, California collagist Shari Gaynes made three years apart show her evolution in the medium. “Citrus dreams started as a silly recording I made with my college friend at the end of our senior year before I moved across the country. I rediscovered the audio during the pandemic and it turned it into a letter of sorts about longing to be with my faraway friend. This is the second collage animation I ever made, and it was created at my kitchen table with a couple lamps and a makeshift overhead rig,” wrote Gaynes. Picnic “was created during the Collage on Screen residency in 2023. I challenged myself to take a more digital approach, allowing myself to animate smaller sections of stop motion on a green screen and digitally scale and place them together. Before this I was adverse to animating outside of the purely analog nature of found materials as they existed in their given sizes, but I’ve since found a lot of useful ways to utilize digital tools in my animations while still staying true to the analog style of it all.”

Arthur Lipsett
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

21-87

collage film cut-up; 9 minutes; 1963

The collage cut-up 21-87 by 20th century Montreal filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (1936-1986) is a comment on a machine-dominated society. The work is often cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars and his conceptualization of “The Force.” “Lipsett didn’t have an easy start in life. Born into a middle-class Montreal family in 1936, he is believed to have witnessed the suicide of his own mother, a Russian Jew from Kiev, at the age of 10,” wrote Carolyne Weldon for the National Film Board of Canada. “The creative genius behind some of the Film Board’s freshest and most unsettling works, Arthur Lipsett was a truly unconventional artist who articulated his unique vision through vivid collage films, inspiring George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick and countless other Canadian and international filmmakers in the process.”

This film is produced and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada.

*This work contains scenes of violence. Viewer discretion is advised.

Eric Stafford
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA

Alibi by Hurray for the Riff Raff

music video; 2:55 minutes; 2024

Eric Stafford told the story of how this video came about: “This project started when my friend Mike, who did the layout for the Hurray for the Riff Raff record ‘The Past Is Still Alive’, reached out. The band had asked if I could ‘make some photos move’ for an online visualizer. Once I spoke with Alynda [Segarra, the band’s lead singer], it was clear they were after something more layered that reflected the LP’s outsider art themes. I asked for access to all the scans and images they had, and also pulled some material myself. Mike had printed and scanned the lyrics for the LP, which became a visual anchor for the piece. My goal was to build on the aesthetic he’d already set in the layout, but push it into a more collage-driven direction. On the technical side, I only had about two days to turn around this project! So all cutting and animating was done in post on scanned assets and I just animated and designed frames intuitively as I went. I also layered in some photographed textures. So the end result is something that feels lo-fi and a little raw.”

Osbert Parker
London, England, United Kingdom

Scala!!!! Programmes & Tentacles

experimental animation; 2:33 minutes; 2023

Three-time British Academy Film Awards nominee Osbert Parker is known “for using innovative film and collage techniques that combine photo cut-out animation with objects and live action to create one-of-a-kind imaginary landscapes.” Scala refers to a cinema-turned-nightclub and live music venue on Pentonville Road, London, England that operated from 1978 to 1993. Parker wrote, “This animated, collage love letter to the Scala Cinema is an outrageous, salacious and joyous celebration of cinema-going with the occasional magic mushroom trip. It was created using mixed media animation, combining photo cut-outs from Scala’s iconic programmes with archive leaflets and octopus tentacles. The mixed media shorts were designed to complement and enrich the feature doc, while bringing an usher’s mushroom trip vividly to life in unexpected ways.”

Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic
Barcelona, Spain

Public Domain

digital collage loop; 1 minute; 2023

Max-o-matic is best known as the director of The Weird Show, a platform that promotes the most outstanding contemporary collage work. The artist wrote, “Drawing inspiration from Oulipo, Surrealism, and psychedelia, I blend appropriated images and bold colors to create thought-provoking and emotionally charged pieces. My technique emphasizes cutting over separating elements and combining them, allowing me to produce complex patterns that give rise to impossible, abstract, and meaningful images. My art aims to initiate conversations about the power of perception and the nature of reality. From exploring the subconscious to uncovering hidden connections between seemingly unrelated objects, I celebrate the vast potential of the human imagination.”

Miwa Matreyek
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Collage and Shadow Demo

Live action and collage animation; 2:53min; 2016-2025

Promise

Performance video; 3:33min; 2023

“As I started making collages in a digital form, it felt like the next step was to add time, movement, and music, and the collages started to dance,” wrote Miwa Matreyek. “I also consider my performances to be collage, as my shadow silhouette becomes integrated into the layers of animations, creating a new whole with new meanings that does not exist until the elements are presented together.” These two films show an evolution of process. The performance video, Promise, shows “a dancer who is between a theatrical scrim and a projection screen.” Matreyek used Artificial Intelligence as an experiment and also as a way to point to “the cookie-cutter lives so many of us lead, going in and out of spaces that kind of all look the same.” Collage and Shadow Demo, originally made in 2016 and remade in 2025 for Collage on Screen, illustrates Matreyek’s process and shows the power of analog collage animation.

Imagined Wing
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Octopus Empire

poetry and collage animation; 1:10 minutes; 2022 

James Dunlap and Edwina White have collaborated as Imagined Wing after finding each other in a gallery in New York City in 2005. While each has their own practice, they work together on film-based projects making award winning documentaries that were shown at Sundance and Cannes Film Festival and short films for Telluride Film Festival and Sesame Street. Octopus Empire animates a poem by Marylin Nelson. The Marginalian wrote about the film, “that we might not, after all, be the pinnacle of Earthly intelligence” is what “Marilyn Nelson explores with great playfulness and poignancy in her poem ‘Octopus Empire,’ originally published in the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day lifeline of a newsletter and now brought to life here, for this seventh installment in the animated Universe in Verse, in a reading by Sy Montgomery (author of the enchantment of a book that is The Soul of an Octopus) with life-filled art by Edwina White, set into motion by her collaborator James Dunlap, and set into soulfulness by Brooklyn-based cellist and composer Topu Lyo.”

John Akre
Louisville, Kentucky, USA

Happy Face Time

stopmotion animation and film cut-up; 1:41 minutes; 2025

“Stop motion animation of collage is at the very beating heart of my work, by combining objects that I find with objects that I make I can show the pictures that I see in my head. Collage allows me to create work in collaboration with relatives and artists who are no longer walking the earth and also with people who are standing right next to me. I create collage animation because it is really the ultimate form of art,” wrote John Akre. “What time is it? It seems to be that everywhere you look, especially in the press, it’s always happy face time. And it’s starting to make me a little crazy. This film was made with paper cutouts from magazines, re-using bits of 35mm movie film, poker chips, and drawings on notecards.”

Shari Gaynes
Los Angeles, California, USA

eternal chic

stopmotion collage; 3:13 minutes; 2019

Full of collage fragments and raw, buoyant energy, the film asks, Where do you turn for comfort? Gaynes wrote, “This is my first ever animated collage, created as a final in my experimental film class my senior year in college. I created it on the floor of my bedroom with a camera on a tripod that had one long leg hooked under the radiator to hold it overhead the cutting mat. It’s messy and imperfect and embodies my search to find my own voice, blaze my own path.”

Emily Denlinger
Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA

Entertainment Purposes Only

collage film cut up and sound collage; 3:50 minutes; 2025

“Entertainment Purposes Only was inspired by the general public’s lack of awareness of the changing landscape of global financial institutions. Denlinger brings to life a narrative based on combined audio clips from several popular cryptocurrency influencers by collaging her personal collection of vintage 8mm home movies with analog collages from fashion and National Geographic magazines. Dystopian and idealistic imagery blend together causing a sense of uncertainty about our future.”

Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic
Barcelona, Spain

Anima Vert #2

digital collage loop; 1 minute; 2024

Cats, Kit-Kat bars, dancing man, sound collage, tigers, a hot air balloon, and I want my MTV….just enjoy. (For more, see above.)

Osbert Parker & Laurie Hill

High Street Repeat

experimental collage film; 4:25 minutes; 2022

Osbert Parker & Laurie Hill’s artist collaboration, High Street Repeat, is an experimental collage film commissioned by the Migration Museum for its “Taking Care of Business” exhibition. “The film uses a range of animation techniques to explore the story of migration and enterprise, told through the changing face of Britain’s high street. But what makes this film fresh and entertaining, is the playful combination of stop motion with digital techniques and manipulation of photographic cut-outs, creating a continuous transition between the past and present.”

Marta Janik
Warsaw, Poland

Black Coffee by Stela featuring Justyna Król and Ewa Mysłakowska

music video; 2:58 minutes; 2018

Marta Janik is a versatile artist, working primarily in the mediums of analog and digital collage. She is interested in surrealism, kitsch, the circus, mushrooms and whales. At times she also incorporates elements of clowning and live performance into her art practice. The music video for the song Black Coffee is a playful parade of analog collage fragments digitally assembled.

Sara C. Rolater
Houston, Texas, USA

The Corrections in Collage

project documentary, 7:59 minutes, 2025

“The Corrections in Collage short film presents and unpacks the process of assembling my art project “The Corrections in Collage”, which entailed creating a collage to correspond to every page of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections. The film’s visuals provide different ways of looking at these collages in a manner that parallels how making them as a response to the novel provided me with new ways of seeing myself and the world. The on-screen medium showcases the motion of the pieces of the collages coming together, reflecting how collage as a genre that’s comprised of literal layered pieces reflects the figurative layers of meaning in a written literary text. The animated figures of myself and Jonathan Franzen that appear throughout the film dramatize how a work of art reflects its creator as well as its consumer. The film also incorporates other responses to The Corrections, with the soundtrack from a band named The Corrections after the book (a track that Franzen himself sent to me) and snippets of a critic’s literary analysis of the novel quoted in my voiceover to establish both Franzen’s work and my response to it as ‘corrective movements’.”

Marria Khan
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan

Water Body

collage animation; 1:53 minutes; 2025

“Like creation myths, flood or deluge myths resonate across many cultures, symbolizing the overwhelming power of natural forces that wash us away, reclaiming what belongs to them. This concept—of floods as instruments wielded by higher forces for retribution, renewal, or purification—is embedded deeply within our collective consciousness. Water Body delves into these themes, exploring the surreal narratives found in these ancient creation and deluge myths. It reflects humankind’s complex and evolving relationship with the natural world. Are we responsible for the imbalances in elemental forces that now wreak havoc upon us? Perhaps once we were not, but undeniably, we are now.”

Rachelle Wunderink
Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

A Woman Consumed

film remix, 3:56 minutes, 2025

“A Woman Consumed is part of a series that remixes 1950s and 1960s commercials into unsettling vignettes that explore the complexities of motherhood. This video collage reinterprets a 1967 advertisement aimed at women consumers, employing layers and abstraction to create a disorienting effect that reflects the challenges of parenting young children. Wunderink’s work captures the mundane rhythms of child-rearing while highlighting matrescence—a transformative experience marked by diminished bodily autonomy and shifting identity. The film emphasizes the often-invisible struggles that accompany motherhood. Wunderink invites viewers to engage with the nuanced realities of maternal identity, challenging conventional representations and fostering a deeper understanding of the personal and societal implications of maternal roles.”

Bella LaMontagne
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, USA

Naturgemӓlde

stopmotion; 1:12 minutes; 2025

Bella LaMontagne’s art and process are based in Naturphilosophie, which explores the relationship between Nature and the mind. Through the medium of collage, Bella breaks down the binary between humans and the wider biotic community. Her work speaks to the human right to roam, exploring the importance of access to natural spaces. She does this by combining fragments of symbolism, folklore, mythology, and contemporary material, to guide viewers through a thought provoking visual narrative that remystifies the world. Naturgemӓlde is a poem about nature and the web of life.

Christine De Vuono
Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Moose Run

stopmotion, 2:49 minutes; 2025

“What is needed to tell a story? When stripped down to the essentials, a successful story needs engaging characters, an arc and something worth telling. Moose Run is a stop motion romp where circles, triangles and squares come together to make characters that have personalities, motivation and adventure. Using simple tools, this animated short illustrates the possibility of creating story and life with basic materials and free (or close to free) technology. Moose Run is an exploration of how to pare down embellishments and technical complexity to tell the simple story of an elderly lady, a moose and their unlikely yet endearing friendship, and the adventure they go on through the magic of collage and animation.”

Darren Floyd
Glendale, Arizona, USA

Ghastly Figure/Worse Than Ever

digital animation, 1:27 minutes; 2024

“Half of us tried to move on, the rest wanted to run it back. This time between two Trump presidencies reminds me of the time between the twin towers falling. After the first one went down, no one went home. Did we know it wasn’t over? It was 30 minutes of confusion, false hope, and impending doom. In this piece, I am concerned with how the violence and cruelty of MAGA trumpism has permeated our national culture, and the long term implications this has for the future of civil society. We are in the eye of a generational storm, a civilizational contest over reality itself. We now have two, concurrent, distinct, national realities. Each with their own sets of facts and data, cultures and signals, fashions and symbols. We are Ameristan, factional, tribal, brutal and brutalizing. It is hard to imagine a peaceful reconciliation.”

Leniqueca Welcome
Washington, DC, USA

The Sun Never Sets

film cut up & collage animation; 2:14 minutes; 2025

“The Sun Never Sets is a riposte to a 1954 British archival film promoting travel to the Caribbean island of Trinidad. The British visual depicts Trinidad as an island paradise inhabited by diverse, happy, colorful natives. What is glaringly omitted from the narrator’s framing is Britain’s colonial relationship with the region and the violent history of plantation agriculture, enslavement, and indenture that shaped the composition of the territory and culture that gets repackaged for tourist consumption. Layering nineteenth and early twentieth-century photos, found footage, and audio excerpts from the 1954 visual piece it critiques, The Sun Never Sets speaks to the social and political-economic processes through which the modern Caribbean was forged, people’s ongoing resistance to the processes and the ways history is felt even when silenced.”

Hillary Carlip
Los Angeles, California, USA

Subterranean Spirits

digital animation; 3:33 minutes; 2024

Hillary Carlip’s works as a multidisciplinary artist are acts of juxtaposition: the sacred and irreverent, the past and the present, highbrow and lowbrow, the uncommon and universal. Her collage animations combine analog, often vintage and handcrafted ephemera, with digital technology, creating authentic stories of future nostalgia. In Subterranean Spirits, a woman strays from the mundane to the magical. By being curious, opening her eyes, and diving into the depths of imagination and what’s below the surface, she finds the extra in ordinary. Subterranean Spirits was an official selection at The Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, Indie Short Fest (Los Angeles) and Independent Shorts Awards (Los Angeles). The film has won awards at the Los Angeles Animation Festival and IndieX Film Fest (Los Angeles).

Tonya Dee McDaniel
Sinajana, Guam, USA

åguaguat

collage animation; 3:25 minutes; 2025

“I grew up and live in the modern day colony of Guam. When I’m faced with a difficult issue, I look to nature and my saina for guidance. Sometimes, the only way through a difficult situation is to be difficult yourself—to be stubborn, or åguaguat as my grandma used to call me. In tourist advertisements of Guam, the Chamorro (Chamoru) people are described as being ‘peaceful, happy, hospitable and adaptable to changing conditions’, and that they had remained ‘staunchly loyal’ to the U.S. during the Japanese occupation of Guam in World War II. We are, generally, very friendly and accommodating to visitors. And Guam has remained a U.S. territory and military base since. I think we are too often passively accepting of what we are dealt for the sake of ‘keeping the peace’. No one wants to disrupt the status quo, especially on a small island. But in the midst of the rapid militarization and environmental deterioration of our island, it is becoming clear that we cannot be ‘accommodating’ of our situation anymore. These issues are not new, but a new generation of Chamorro advocates is rising to the challenge of protecting our island. Historically, we have overcome the odds in spite of our circumstances–and that is inspiring to me.” The inclusion of McDaniel’s animated short film titled åguaguat, was celebrated by The Guam Daily Post: “A Guam-born artist is gaining international recognition through animation, breaking geographical barriers and bringing Chamoru cultural elements to a global audience.”