The flash of inspiraton came 50 years ago this week, in a house on Banadics Road in Ellenville. Dean Kalman Lennert was a kid, maybe nine years old at that point, and like many of us he was a little obsessed with dinosaurs.

Kalman Lennert was watching a show called Zoom on PBS, and it showed young audiences how to use a movie camera to make their own stop-motion animated film – this is the kind of herky-jerky clay model animation of things like King Kong.

“I was really into [stop-motion animator Ray] Harryhausen’s work. Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, which was all stop motion animation,” Kalman Lennert recalled. “I turned to my mom and asked, ‘Do we have a movie camera?’”

They did, and he became “camera person for the day,” bringing his dinosaur model kits to life.

“I still have the ankylosaurus from my collection,” he told the Shawangunk Journal in our interview.

Pick your own cliche for that one, but not the thing about acorns.

From the earliest films to Pixar and beyond, animation is a part of filmmaking that’s groundbreaking and innovative. It began that way with Georges Melies 1902 classic A Trip to the Moon – that’s the one where the rocket puts out the moon’s eye – and expanded everything from the cute, expensive Disney cartoons to grungy underground envelope-pushers.

One of the latest envelope-pushers on the scene is the work of Kalman Lennert, an Ellenvillian, born and raised a Blue Devil, who has spent almost forty years quietly at work on quite a project.

It started back in 1987, with a discovery in a tree.

“It was the summer before my senior year at NYU,” Kalman Lennert explained. “I had written a script for a different film. But the professor, Richard Protovin, who headed the animation department there took one look at that script and said ‘this is too long.’ So, I was trying to think of what I could do for a shorter script, and I took a walk in the woods that weekend when I was in town, visiting.”

He and a friend came upon a red balloon hanging in a tree, with a note attached in a little plastic bag. The message was a letter from a lonely lady in an Ohio home for the aged, named Anna Olson.

From such minor miracles come great stories, right?

“It had come from Ohio, quite a long ride for a little balloon. I have no idea how long it had been hanging in that tree in its little Ziploc bag. And, in very little time, I had the story roughed out in my head. I laugh about that now, because it was going to be a three-minute film, which it could have been but, well, it kept growing and growing.”

He also had the great advantage of a family whom he describes as supportive.

“I had no back up plan, because animation and making films was what I wanted to do. In high school if there was something going on to do with film and filmmaking, I was all over it.”

Kalman Lennert gives props to his teachers at Ellenville High School, too.

“I was in school there from nursery through graduation,” he said. “I felt like I was very supported by teachers who understood my interests.” He cited Mr. Percoco, Dr. Kalipalitis, Marjory Simon, and Bonnie Kaplan among the figures in the school who helped him along.

The short, called Dear Anna Olson, became his final project at NYU. “I animated a handful of shots for it, and kept at it after graduation.”

After graduation, he was eventually hired at J. J. Seidelmaier Studios in White Plains, where he worked on Beavis & Butthead. “I was brought onto that project as assistant animator and sometimes as animator. In those ‘boutique’ place you wear many hats... We were trying to crank the show out as quickly as possible.”

In those days, Beavis & Butthead was “hand animated with digital paint and compositing... All the digital work was in California.” He spent four years at Seidelmaier’s, handling a number of commercials and short segments for Saturday Night Live.

In 1997, he moved to Blue Sky Studio, a growing company also based out of Westchester, that would eventually be responsible for the Ice Age franchise. About the same time, in the late ‘90s, he began teaching stop-motion and puppet fabrication at his alma mater. “I had just become a father. And that was the beginning of my teaching time at NYU,” he said. “Now closing in on 30 years there.”

Through it all, from Beavis to Ice Age and the classroom, Kalman Lennert worked weekends and evenings on his college film, Dear Anna Olson. He has been, and is, doing pretty much everything, by hand, for this film. “That is the drawings, the cell work, the photography,” he explained.

The plan now is for a 20-minute film without dialogue, “created using colored pencils, watercolors and inks on paper and frosted acetate.” That doesn’t sound like much, but for one person, it amounts to an incredible number of drawings.

“Thing is, I was able to use every idea I’d ever had. I could go down every rabbit hole and push myself to my limits, artistically. I’m looking at a stack of drawings right now, seven layers of drawings, all stuff happening in a frame. Almost every shot is very dense like that. So, this film evolved into its own thing in terms of the look and the pacing – and I have to add it was influenced by everybody who’s been involved with it. Like Nancy, my wife.”

He depends on Nancy to be production supervisor. “When I’m doing something, I run it past her and discuss how I’m approaching it.”

It’s not just the small staff, but the manner of production that make it unique. “All this stuff was created using the same animation equipment as in all the 20th century animation. I have had the same animation table since 1986, when my parents bought it for me.”

So, when will we see Dear Anna Olson? “The joke has always been, ‘In two years.’ There are so many variables. And until I get a certain amount of money, I can’t lock it down.”

And, in case you were wondering, Dean wrote back to Anna Olson. He sent her a card, but he never heard back. He has no idea still how long the balloon was in the tree or whether she was even alive when he found it. She might be surprised to learn about the long tail of gesture, a “life’s work” that came out of a walk in the woods here in Ellenville.

If you’d like to donate to Kalman Lennert to support the project, go to www.dearannaolson.com.