By 1978 I was a member of several, often mutually exclusive, organizations: I was a member of Screen Cartoonist Local 841 (the IATSE affiliate that insured animation workers of a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, vacation, holiday and severance pay, health and retirement benefits), the Union Animators' Group (made up of journeymen animators who thought the union as a whole underrepresented their needs and concerns), ASIFA-East, and George Griffin's group of independent animators (a group that felt that ASIFA didn't represent them, and used this monthly meeting as an opportunity to show works in progress and compare notes). I was an inveterate animation festival goer. I felt that I was an independent animator and found the freedom in independent film exhilarating. When I'd report to the Union Animators' Group about the films I'd seen, many would snort at the idea of moving sand or string under a camera and calling it art. When I'd try to rally the independents into thinking about unity as a protection against unfair labor practices, that joining the Union could possibly protect them, I'd get a similar jeer.

All this to say, that I was one of the few commercial animators to be present at the 1978 Ottawa Film Festival. I was actually there with the short Fat Farm, one of the Weekend pieces, which I directed, designed, animated and co-wrote. We wrote the pieces by committee at "story meetings" from which I would create a storyboard. For this film, I was uncredited and my way unpaid, but what a festival! Caroline Leaf presented her sand version of Metamorphosis, a tour-de-force of storytelling, Kathy Rose's Pencil Booklings where she had rotoscoped herself to be among her characters, La Traversee de l'Atlantique a la Rame, an incredible cut-out metaphor of marriage by Jean-Francois Laguionie, Sara Petty's Furies, with its beautiful color pencil drawings of cats and George Griffin's Viewmaster, an homage to Eadweard Muybridge. Work by Janet Perlman, Al Jarnow, Jimmy Picker, John Weldon and others was also screened. Five nights of screenings with work so varied in texture, tone and technique, it made one feel like film could look like or be anything. Many of them were done by women which was a major difference from the commercial studios where women were often relegated to ink and paint! Although there were commercials presented, the overall interest was in the independent fiction films.

Playing with Live-Action Footage
I returned to New York ready to start working on my own film in my spare time. I had actually finished my first independent film in 1977; an homage to Saul Steinberg, who asked me not to show it until he had a chance to make his own animated film. (I'm still waiting....) This time however, I wanted to combine still photos and animation. Ever since its inception, animation was combined with live-action to intensify its magic, contrast it with reality, show fantasy, etc. In commercials, we always shot live-action film footage, rotoscoped what was necessary, then animated to the live and combined the animation film and live-action film in an optical. Needless to say, this was very expensive and time-consuming. Many independents were playing with live-action footage in a variety of experimental ways: with plain rotoscoping, as Kathy Rose, George Griffin and Mary Beams were doing, with stills, like Al Jarnow, and some were using Xeroxes pulled directly from 16mm film. I liked the way the motorized stills looked and decided to shoot myself as an actress preparing for an audition. Audition was finally finished in 1980, but the initial storyboard appeared in Frames, George Griffin's publication, in 1978.

Within the year the Weekend show was canceled and my creative autonomy came to an end. It was at this point that I got to develop as a character animator because Perpetual Motion started doing half-hour television specials. It was liberating being able to make the characters act without worrying about the design or layout. However, I began to miss directing and designing, so Buzz Potamkin and I struck a deal. He would offer me the commercials that came in that didn't require a given designer, or that Hal Silvermintz was too busy to handle. So, I was animating a few scenes in Strawberry Shortcake in Big Apple City during the Spring of 1981, and was laying out and directing some Sunshine Baker and Aziza eye makeup ads, when a rush spot came in, in March.