MULTIPLANE BUTTERFLY TEST 16MM CELL ANIMATION 1977 John Allen - designer, animator Chris Walker - background painter, effects director After a year of RISD, Rhode Island School of Design, I understood that the film department was off limits to undergraduates so I set off with my partner in animation, Chris Walker, for San Francisco where we started an animation company, Zany Eminators. We spent about 4 years on the development of the animated film about the life story of a monarch butterfly. Here is one of the test shoots of the multiplane downshooter that we built. It was modeled after one small photo of the Disney camera built for Snow White in 1932. Chris Walker and I eventually got into computer animation at it's inception as a artistically viable tool in 1983. We bought Ghering Aviation as it went under and started Mr.Film in 1986. We did commercials, station IDs, industrials and special effects for film and TV. I left the company in 1990 and Chris eventually started Modern Cartoons based on the earliest motion capture technology. He was a pioneer in computer imagery.