There was a huge, old-fashioned animation stand buried deep in the maze of the Library building. I was able to sign up on the roster and use it nearly any time I wanted. In 1975 I had taken an internship with the regional educational television station in Tacoma. My aim was to produce a three minute piece. But there were two big problems.

The first little complication was the fact that I could find no one to really spend time and teach me how the animation stand worked. Believe me, I tried. My faculty sponsor really knew nothing about animation or cartooning, he was an anthropologist! The keeper of the stand basically threw open the door for me and said, "Have at it, kid." So I taught myself how to use the contraption. My short film was an animation of the song "Surrey With The Fringe On Top," set for an elementary school audience. To this day, I can't hear that song without thinking about this episode.

The second problem was that even though the television station wanted a three minute segment, they had, as I discovered only after I completed shooting, supplied me with less than two minutes of film. That meant that almost half of my labor was spent on what could be charitably called "conceptual art." But I still had time to be resourceful and complete not one but two finished short films by the end of the quarter. And I did it without using the animation stand.

Inspired by the innovative Canadian animator Norman McLaren, I ran some leader film through a projector. This discolored the white film enough for me to identify where the frames were located. Then I painstakingly drew, with a fine point India ink pen, on each frame. At 32 frames per second, it took awhile, but the result was sort of a shimmering effect that I really liked. I can't remember what I entitled this thing, but it was finished in time for the College film festival. I think I gave this little project to a roommate, and if it is still around today it must be very brittle and unwatchable.

The second project was really fun. While in the editing room, I noticed the trash was filled with discarded snippets of film from other students. I liberated this Celluloid from a landfill fate and spliced them all together into an hour long Dadaistic motion picture version of "found art." I recall there was footage of model boats being tested in the TESC swimming pool, a guy puking in a rehab clinic, and parts of a commercial trailer for some B movie. This epic was shown a half dozen times or so to a select audience of beer swilling students, and the splices were so numerous that the film broke at least three or four times in every showing.

I never went back to animation after that, and I stayed with the tried and true black and white line drawing on paper. There was another cartoonist I knew at TESC who shared my view of animation. Our styles were both simple and we liked getting a lot of ideas out in a short time. Animation required the cartoonist to spend weeks of painful and tedious detail work on just one or two ideas. We agreed this was not the most enjoyable way to draw. That other cartoonist, who I consider one of the sharpest and funniest minds in the business, is named Matt Groening.