Woloshen's work is heavily inspired by music, particularly jazz, and with numerous short abstract works in which the images are created in synchronization to a music track. Woloshen's film 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 deeper sound of a tuba appears in blocky shapes of colour, contrasted with fine white squiggles corresponding to a woman singing.
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. Woloshen cites jazz-like elements of improvisation and chance as important to his work. Because his films are self-funded and the tools of his craft (film leader, markers, inks, brushes and craft knives) are readily available, he can seize on an inspiration and act on it immediately. He writes: “I think spontaneous urges and desires are the best part of handmade film making.” Woloshen often uses a constructed portable scratch box so that he could do scratch animation during breaks on his job as a driver in the feature film industry. Some of his films depart somewhat from this method, such as
The Babble on Palms (2001) and
Two Eastern Hair Lines (2004).
The Babble on Palms features various found-footage scenes of everyday life, accompanied by music by
Ali Akbar Khan. The outline of a hand appears over all of the scenes, partially blocking one's view. The hand is treated with constantly changing decoration such as dots and spirals, and patterns and colors reminiscent of both the
Solar System and cells under a microscope – the universe is contained in the hand. Woloshen suggests his film depicts a thread connecting all people, but also the limitations of each person's viewpoint and the individuality (the “hand print”) that sets people apart.
Two Eastern Hair Lines also employs found footage, and is composed primarily of scenes of two or three people – a man and woman in a room together, two men seated across a desk from one another, a couple seated side-by-side. Parts of the images are framed, blocked out, or painted over, dividing and isolating the figures from each other. Set against a 1939
Chinese recording, “Parting at Yang Kwan,”
Two Eastern Hair Lines is full of longing. It reflects on the unbridgeable distance between people and the difficulties of communication. As Woloshen writes in his description, “Sometimes the rifts between us are as wide as rivers, and sometimes as small as hair lines.” He has been a five-time
Jutra/Iris award nominee for
Best Animated Short Film, receiving nods at the
6th Jutra Awards in 2004 for
Two Eastern Hair Lines, the
8th Jutra Awards in 2006 for
The Curse of the Voodoo Child, the
12th Jutra Awards in 2010 for
Playtime, the
19th Quebec Cinema Awards in 2019 for
Casino, and the
22nd Quebec Cinema Awards in 2020 for
Organic. ==Writing==