After a year of conducting Super 8 experiments in the barn/studio with my friend Dave Herr, I felt ready to make a narrative short on my own.  I drew and rendered a mountain of artwork over the next eighteen months and, by early 1990, I needed to shoot the film called “Harvest Town.”  Fellow animator Alison Morse told me that the Minneapolis College of Art and Design had a 16mm Bolex camera mounted on a stand designed to shoot cel animation.  I made an arrangement with the equipment manager at MCAD to reserve the camera stand for a strict thirty-six-hour period; immediately before and after that time students would be using the camera for classwork.  How could shooting five minutes of animation possibly take more than thirty-six hours?

   I started early in the morning on a Thursday, thinking that I’d work until dinner time, take the evening off and finish shooting on Friday.  In this still largely pre-digital era, one organized an animation project by means of an exposure sheet.  This document represented the frame-by-frame map of the shooting process, an outline for the thousands of individual images in the project.  The exposure sheet indicated when a series of drawings were to be repeated as a cycle of movement, which drawings were to be layered in what order over specific backgrounds and, generally, at what point of completion one stood in the task.

   By noon that Thursday it was already apparent that I wasn’t going to have a break for dinner, that I wasn’t likely going to sleep that night and that I’d also be lucky to finish the job within the allotted thirty-six hours that I had with the camera.  I resolved to work more quickly, determined that I could get the work done if I focused hard.  My father had taught me by example that life is an act of will and persistence.  Though this obsessiveness hasn’t always worked in my social relationships, it has served me well as an animator; what must get done, will get done.

   I worked all day while the lights heated the tiny, unventilated room, then through the night, taking breaks only to buy Dr. Pepper from a vending machine.  The shooting process resembled assembly line work:  lift the glass platen that holds the artwork flat under the camera, remove the previous drawings, mount the next drawings on the peg bars that hold the punched artwork in place, check the page numbers against the exposure sheet to insure that the order is correct, lower the platen, expose two frames of film with the shutter release while listening to the abrasive winding of the motor as the film advances, check the numbers on the motor’s frame counter against the exposure sheet and repeat the whole process again, thousands of times in succession.  The camera operator has to remain focused in order to avoid mistakes, but because the activity is so mechanically repetitive, one’s mind has a tendency to wander.  Around dawn, after one of these robotic iterations, I discovered that there was a discrepancy between the frame counter on the camera and my exposure sheet.  I’d made an error sometime during the night!  I lay on the cement floor in a state of anxiety and reflected, “I can’t really afford to shoot this again and I can’t afford post-production work so I can only hope the mistake isn’t too apparent in the film.”  The combination of stress, intense concentration and sleep-deprivation weighed heavily upon me like defeat.  I’d been working on this film for the last year and a half with a fanatical determination and, to justify that sacrifice, it had not only to get finished but it had to be good.  After conceding that the only thing I could ultimately control was the ‘getting finished,’ I stood up and assessed the exposure sheet.  Twelve hours remained with the camera and I still had a little more than a third of the film to shoot.  “No time to feel sorry for myself,” I conceded and set to work again with even greater resolve and machine-like precision.

   When a student knocked on the door at 6:05 p.m. on Friday evening for their scheduled time slot, I had just successfully unloaded the exposed five minutes of film from the camera.  My first animated film, “Harvest Town,” was ‘in the can.’

   With a mixture of exhaustion and relief, I drove the metal film canister to a processing lab in a suburb of Minneapolis.  As soon as I delivered the film to the lab, the responsibility of the shoot disappeared and a perverse wave of adrenaline flowed through me.  Though I’d missed an entire night of sleep and had worked with great concentration for thirty-six straight hours, I didn’t want to rest.  I wanted to see a movie!  I drove directly to the nearest General Cinema multiplex.  When I arrived, “Bad Influence” was scheduled to start in ten minutes.  I bought a ticket and took a seat in the semi-darkness with one other man, waiting for the film to begin.  I inexplicably chose to sit in the same row with the solitary man, leaving five or six seats between us; he took notice of me and indicated discomfort in his expression.  I remember little of the movie.  I recall that Rob Lowe encourages James Spader to act out his darker fantasies, which ultimately turn criminal.  I believe that Rob Lowe was cast in the sociopath role because a videotape of him with two underage girls in a hotel room had surfaced not long before and he had accidentally cultivated a more complicated public persona.

   What I remember most clearly from the screening is the General Cinema trailer which preceded the film and which I’d seen dozens of times in this late 1980’s form.  Against a starry background, a calming, baritone voice said, “Welcome to General Cinema where we bring you the finest in motion picture entertainment.”  Then, candy and popcorn floated forward from the stars accompanied by carnival-like music.  The General Cinema logos had always generated a grinning, Pavlovian, sense of good cheer in me.

   In my current state of exhaustion, however, this euphoria quickly induced a catastrophic mental chaos and I began to sob convulsively.  I felt as if I were a primitive man, emotionally unprepared for the revelation of cinema, sent forward in time to witness the miraculous opening of a giant window.  In fact, my child-like awe was similar to Vachel Lindsey’s fascination, writing about the new cinematic medium in 1915:

   In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads, disappearing when largest.  There is an explosive power about the mildest motion picture exit, be the actor skillful or the reverse.  The people left in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing Cyclops.

   In this state of naïve cinema-awe, I had my first conscious apprehension that the movies were sometimes a window rather than light cast upon a screen, and that this experience of the large window opening into another life, or deeper into this life, was overwhelmingly beautiful on its own terms.  The content of the movie is irrelevant in the face of this fundamental recognition.

  I turned to my companion, the only other person in the theater, sitting six seats to my right.  He glanced at me nervously because I was now crying quite audibly.  I beckoned to the stranger in the flickering light of the General Cinema preshow trailer and I felt an immense connectedness with him.  We belonged here together.  I loved him.  Between sobs, I gasped with great conviction, “We’re all in this together!”  He smiled and nodded as if to say, “That’s absolutely true” and, to his credit, remained in that seat throughout the film.