There was a message on the answering machine for Wendy from Chris Quiltain in his clipped and formal tone, who left a phone number with a New York area code where he could be reached. We wrote his name and the number near Frank’s on the kitchen wall and took the cassette out of the machine and replaced it with a different one, labelled it Chris Quiltain’s call, and put the cassette in with the rest of Wendy’s dubbed cassettes. You never know, we said to each other. Our plan was to finish some more animation on the Macintosh. Ever since we saw the commercial with Manila in it, we wanted to try this new artist-friendly computer. Wendy bought us one. It cost five thousand dollars, it was worth more than her car. We fooled around for hours and learned how to draw with the mouse. The ability to undo instead of erase was a profound adjustment that allowed us to prevaricate over every line, right down to the pixel, and get even less accomplished. We had the idea to do a sequence of a few minutes of the animated Christmas special using MacPaint illustrations we printed out onto celluloid and then photographed.
What do You think about The Road Narrows As You Go?
