…In Those Days is the realization of a sci-fi fantasy film I had conceived as a child that involved the perils of a small group of travelers struggling to make their way across an icy desert after being stranded on a mysterious world. This animation was painstakingly hand drawn using black and white pen and pencils over a period of seven years. It came to about 4,000 drawings, so I could only be so detailed with my art. I had to draw them as simply as possible and still convey what I needed to tell the story. It was captured on 16mm film in 1993. The plot was basically improvised everytime I sat down to sketch. The story grew more and more as I got a new ideas. I had concepts I was using, but didn’t know what was going to happen until it was coming out of my pen.
I located a 16mm camera capable of stop-frame animation at Martin Hill in North Carolina for $500. It wasn’t until the film was processed at the lab did I find out that there was a gate problem. Each frame was exposed differently, giving the movie a “flickering” effect that was really frustrating.
Using an AVID from Henninger Media Services, I was able to transfer the negatives to digital and complete the 24 track audio. What you see today is the surviving Beta SP copy.
Like most of my early work, it is held back by it’s amateur execution, but makes up for it in creativity.
