JANUARY 1994

A year has passed since I started trying to bring T. Fly to life...if only for a minute.  My first job would be to finish coloring the 481 drawings.  It took me 3 days but I finally finished.  But this was my graduation year and I was so busy with trying to get a feature script done and trying to edit my short film "Asburied" that I let "Boxed" go by the wayside...

AUGUST 1996

My friend Steve Hicks had picked up a super 8mm camera really cheap at a garage sale.  When I heard this the idea to shoot "Boxed" with his camera popped into my head.  Why not?  I liked film better than video anyway.  At the time I was living in LA.  Super 8mm film had come pretty hard to get.  Luckily there was a lab in Hollwyood that still dealt with it.  Yale Lab.  I remember racing from my job in Burbank to Hollywood right the day I left just to pick up one roll of super 8mm film.  Since it'd been 3 years since I started some of the basics had left my memory.  I wasn't sure how many frames per picture I should shoot it at.  I tried calling a few places in NYC that did animation but really nobody could give me a straight answer.  I wanted to know the generic rule to use.  What I got was "Well, it depends.  The amount of frames you shoot per picture will determine the speed."  I knew this, but I didn't know how many to shoot to make it look "normal" speed.  I wasn't after any camera gimmicks.  So I decided to guess.  I shot 2 frames per picture.  I set up some pegs in my sister's old room in my mom's house.  Animation paper has these punch holes in them.  So I blocked off the room, and hung each picture on the pegs.  Shot one light right at the picture and shot the picture one frame...then another...and switched picture and repeated this all night until all 481 pictures had been filmed.  When I returned to LA I dropped off the film at Yale Lab and had it processed.  But since I didn't have a super 8mm projector, I never got to watch the film to see if it worked...

OCTOBER 1999

Now back in NJ, for some reason I decided to get my super 8mm transferred to BetaSP.  Finally see if myanimation worked...6 years later.  I sent the film off to Devlin Labs in NYC.  When I got it back I watched it with nervous eyes.  It had the warm, yellow tint of super 8mm...but for the most part it worked.  My guess of 2 frames per picture seemed to be the right way to go.  Some of the colors were too dark.  If I could shoot it again I could maybe blast it with more light...but I doubt that was gonna happen.  Since it was silent I decided to lay down a soundtrack.  I searched for a tune that was a minute long.  I found one on the Beastie Boys album "Ill Communication" called "Tough Guy."  Not only did the song fit length-wise but it fit content wise too.  It made it that much better.  So it took me six years but my little stab at animation worked out in the end...