Steven Woloshen

Steven Woloshen (born 1960) is a Canadian film animator and a pioneer of drawn-on-film animation.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Woloshen first attended Vanier College, where he worked with Super-8 film and video, then specialized in 16 mm independent film techniques at Concordia University in Montreal. He has since created animated and experimental films, which have been shown at screenings and festivals around the world.

Working in camera-less animation since 1982, Woloshen has used scratches and lacerations on film to create emotional content.

Woloshen is a Montreal-based camera less animator who has been making films since the late ‘70’s. He studied film at Concordia University, where he initially made documentaries and collage films, but the freedom and accessibility of scratch animation won him over. Since 1999 he has worked exclusively in 35mm CinemaScope, an oddity in the independent film world that is made possible by his otherwise thrifty means of production. His works have screened worldwide at festivals including the Montreal World Film Festival, Tampere International Short Film Festival, Annecy Animated Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and I Castelli Animati in Rome.

Woloshen is heavily inspired by music, particularly jazz, and has made numerous short abstract works in which the images are created in synchronization to a music track. While most of his films are exuberantly colored, Me Me Ma Ma (2000) is done in spare black and white. White scratches resembling rubbings, chalk drawings or electronic static jitter across a black background, matched to the driving beat of a techno music piece. Bru Ha Ha! (2002) takes a piece by Erik Satie and translates it into abstract imagery. The deep, masculine sound of a tuba appears in blocky shapes of colour, contrasted with delicate white squiggles corresponding to a woman singing. The tuba and voice play off each other as if in conversation, male and female. Dave Brubeck’s jazz classic “Take Five” is the inspiration for Cameras Take Five (2002), in which fluid lines represent the saxophone voice, moving over top of color fields of electric blue and green interspersed with playful shapes and doodles. These are vibrant, light-hearted works, which capture the spirit and energy of the music.

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