Chel White (born May 30, 1959) is an American film director, composer, screenwriter and visual effects artist. In his independent films and music videos, White is known for his stylized, often experimental use of images, unusual animation and narratives depicting an outsider's perspective. He often adopts darkly humorous and poetic sensibilities to explore topics of love, obsession and alienation; with dreams and the subconscious being his greatest influences. He describes his own work as “stories and images that reside on the brink of dreams, or linger on the periphery of distorted memories.” A Rockefeller Fellow, Chel White has made three films based on the work of Peabody Award-winning writer and radio personality Joe Frank (Dirt, Soulmate, Magda ).
Chale Nafus of the Austin Film Society says, "I have been amazed at the stylistic and thematic diversity in (Chel White’s) films. Surreal, ethereal, wistful, and witty, I just allow my imagination to be taken into his complex, mysterious worlds.” The Austin Chronicle says, "(Chel White's) work seems to dispatch itself in some secret, subversive code, flashing messages amid animation, obscure stock footage, and actors with crazy eyes."
Chel White has directed music videos for Radiohead's Thom Yorke, The Melvins, Tom Brosseau, Chrystabell & David Lynch, and collaborated with the Oregon Symphony. He has worked extensively with film director Gus Van Sant, creating visual effects on several of Van Sant's projects. White began directing commercials in 1992, and with a focus in stop motion, began directing television programs in 1999, including two parodies for Saturday Night Live. Along with Ray Di Carlo and David Daniels, Chel White is a co-founder of the international production company Bent Image Lab in Portland, Oregon.
Early life and education
Chel White was born in Kansas City, Missouri and grew up in Colorado, Michigan, Stockholm, and Evanston, Illinois where his father was a Northwestern University professor and his mother a schoolteacher. White cites his earliest influence as being the Surrealist paintings he was exposed to in grade school when visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. He began making films in high school where, studying under instructors Peter Kingsbury and Kevin Dole, he was introduced to the films of Norman McLaren, Harry Everett Smith, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Will Hindle, Len Lye and Jean Cocteau. White recalls, "When I was 16, I realized animation was the bridge between being an artist and a filmmaker. At that point I never looked back." In 1984, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts, with a central focus on experimental film, from Antioch College.
Independent filmmaker
Chel White began making independent short films after college, starting with a drawn-on-film animation titled Metal Dogs of India (1985). In 1991, White completed Choreography for Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha), an animated film created solely by using the unique photographic capabilities of a photocopier to generate sequential pictures of hands, faces, and other body parts. The film is widely considered the first noteworthy animated film using this technique. The Washington Post describes it as “(a) musical frolic which wittily builds on ghostly, distorted images crossing the plate glass of a copier.” The films that followed include Dirt (1998), Soulmate (2000), Passage (2001), Magda (2004), A Painful Glimpse Into My Writing Process in Less Than 60 Seconds (2005), Wind (2007), the feature film Bucksville (2011), the Donald Trump horror parody Little Donnie (2017), and Dreams of a Fallen Astronaut (2020) part of the Gratzfilm omnibus The One Minute Memoir.
In 2002, as a poetic response to the tragedies of September 11, Chel White created New York to be part of the omnibus collection Underground Zero. The Chicago Tribune called White's film "an eerie paean to the city itself," and Bill Stamets of the Chicago Reader said, “Chel White’s New York makes a ruined city enchanted again: jets ascend in twilight, framed by silhouetted rooftops and cranes, and droplets sparkle like tiny diamonds as kids delight in the spray of fire hydrants."