Once upon a time, as the storybook says, a couple of ambitious young cartoon-makers out at Walt Disney's mouse-factory had a brainstorm. Maybe it was just a worse one than usual. Anyway, they wanted to learn more of the practical details of film production — what it takes to put a film together and make it tick. Reasoning that those fundamentals are the same whether the subject is live action or a cartoon, they decided to devote their spare time for the next six or seven months to making a 16mm. feature picture.
And did they learn about the problems of film production — ! We can answer that with a great big affirmative, for we might as well break down right now and admit that we were the two brainstormers involved. We learned a lot about the mechanical fundamentals of making a real movie — and we also learned a lot about why professional producers, directors and cinematographers grow gray hair and acquire headaches and nervous indigestion! When you start making a feature picture, we found, you can get just as good a crop of headaches out of 16mm. as from 35mm. Probably the same thing goes for 8mm. as well.
And we'll never make uncomplimentary remarks about a professional picture which has gone 'way beyond its prescribed schedule and budget ! Ours did, too! At the start, we planned to have our epic finished in six months; well, a year and a half more was required to finish it. Final score, two years (of week-ends and holidays) in production, 7,000 feet of Eastman Super-X 16mm. reversal film shot, and over §850 of our hard-earned dollars invested. The result is a feature-length picture of 1750 sixteen millimeter feet, with a running time of 1 hour and 15 minutes, which our friends have told us is "not too bad for amateurs." […]
