Award-winning film SKRFF premieres online.
This eye-catching graffiti inspired animation excavates our limited view of history.
https://youtu.be/0PRJjd6ebdQ?si=-vdOB_jM4ebLb6EK

Sunday February 8, 2026 – The animated short SKRFF by artists Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nuderscher is now online after a successful festival run. Debuting a new approach to animation, the abstract film reveals hundreds of layers of paint through incremental carvings on a 40-year old graffiti wall in Vienna, Austria. The wall becomes an archaeological site and a sgraffito sculpture as long-forgotten colors are uncovered and transformed into expansive abstract patterns. The combination of stop-motion animation with a visceral soundtrack by Sandro Nicolussi compresses decades of artistic, political, and cultural expression into a new audio-visual dimension. Driven by frustration with the global rise of toxic ideologies, the artists created this street art metaphor in an earnest attempt to know and understand the past and the present.

SKRFF premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2024 and has screened at major festivals around the world including Annecy International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb and the London International Animation Festival. It has won several awards during its festival run, including a coveted nomination for the Österreichischer Filmpreis (Austrian Academy Awards), the Audience Award at Punto y Raya Festival, First Prize in the Experimental Animation category at the ASIFA East Festival in New York, and Best Short at the street art-focused Blind Walls Film Festival 2025. The Blind Walls jury statement reveals the underlying significance of the work: “Without a single spoken word, it pays tribute to generations of expression, to the ever-changing nature of public art, and to the importance of spaces where creativity can thrive. With its unique technique and thought-provoking concept, this film challenges the way we view art —not as something static, but as something constantly rewritten, layered, and rediscovered.”

Underneath the explosions of color lie serious political and philosophical themes. Nuderscher’s initial idea to dig into his local graffiti walls was in part motivated by haunting movements in Austria’s zeitgeist: “The question about the history of things, especially the history of Austria during WWII was very present at that time due to unsettling political changes in Austria.” The excavation of urban history resonated with Parks, an American who was in Vienna on a Fulbright Scholar Artist Residency: “My work manipulates time and explores the limited perspective humans have as they view the complex world. Our countries were experiencing very similar political trends and that made this project an appealing metaphor. Not to mention an exciting new animation technique to explore!”

The film was shot entirely on location at a legal graffiti wall in the center of Vienna through a variety of DIY animation techniques, including a skateboard dolly shot and portable strobe lights. Technical director and animator Thom Parks worked alongside Nuderscher and Parks to make carvings on the walls that were incrementally changed and captured frame-by-frame. The artists dubbed themselves “skrffologists” during the process: “It felt like a form of urban archaeology, like we were trying to discover something about the past by digging through the layers. Then the Italian word sgraffito came to mind, which means to carve into pottery or painting, but it’s also where the word graffiti comes from. So we sort of made a tag for our work, SKRFF and called ourselves skrffologists.” Later, sound artist Nicolussi was brought onto the project to capture field recordings and create a complex and nuanced soundscape which itself had over 50 layers.

In true street-art style, the film was released on Youtube without the trappings of production companies, distributors, or carefully-crafted media fanfare. The skrffologists created the work because it was fun and they had something to say. Now it is out there for anyone to discover if they turn the right corner of the internet.