The lost epic ... found!

The story of this movie has a surprise ending, one that's more interesting the movie itself – and was literally decades in the making.

In 1974, as a ninth-grader enrolled in Film In The Cities, a filmmaking program of the St. Paul school system, I created an animated film starring my ersatz Spider-Man character, The Human Fly. 

I had originally planned to draw it in traditional animation style, cell by cell, but when my instructor figured the cost of acetate sheets for even a short movie, it was suggested that I instead use cutout figures against drawn backgrounds. 
 
After storyboarding a very simple story – the Human Fly breaks up a mugging – I set to work drawing the necessary figures and poses, and hinging their limbs with threads attached to the back of the cutouts. 
 
Over a couple of months, I animated the figures, edited the film, and added a soundtrack of "action" music and sound effects. At my instructor's suggestion, I wrote and recorded a conversation between two policemen that would play under the credits to set up the story. (I also voiced cop #2.) 

The finished movie was presented with other student productions at an end-of-semester film festival and reception. My film was lumped in the middle of all the films shown, and frankly, there was nothing special about it. Some of the films were better, some were worse, some were more ambitious, some less – but most were a lot more original. 

 
However, my movie was one of the few to be cited in a Minneapolis Tribune column previewing the film festival, mentioning my name and describing how "Bullets Bradshaw's city of fear is stopped by the Human Fly, who does him in with bonks, pows, and thoomps.”
 
Apparently, my on-screen sound effects were the most notable thing in the entire film.

* * *

Over the years, I'd periodically wonder whatever became of the print of my movie. Film In The Cities had closed in 1993; I assumed The Human Fly must have been boxed up with all the other student films for storage and was probably lost or disposed of at some point.

Jump cut to four decades later ...

In November 2022, I happened across a local documentary on Film In The Cities. Although my movie wasn't one of the clips shown, I realized that all these student films must still exist ... somewhere. I started searching online and was surprised to discover the FITC student films – including mine – were now in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society.

All these years, it had been there all along and I had no idea. Once I verified that I was indeed the creator of my film, the Historical Society was able to make me a digital copy. 

The epic was finally mine, 48 years later.

As you might guess, after all the time, the film was a little faded and the soundtrack was in bad shape (a third of it was more or less missing). So I remastered it as best as I could, rebuilt the music track and sound effects, and tightened up a few edits. 

Of course, what I couldn't fix were my drawings and my very shaky understanding of anatomy. Those I'm afraid we're stuck with.