In 1958, Paul Fierlinger started working as the first freelancer for a television studio in Czechoslovakia.

Since Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule at the time, people were not allowed to own 35mm cameras, Fierlinger said. But they were allowed to own 16mm cameras because they were considered amateur. Then, television came along, and 16mm cameras were used for that.

He escaped Czechoslovakia in 1967 and worked as a freelancer through Europe and continued to be a freelancer for the rest of his life.

“I can brag that I’m the oldest freelancer in the history of animation,” he said.

They've done a fair amount of work for PBS, and won a Peabody Award with a film called "Still Life with Animated Dogs."

Paul and his wife Sandra now live down the road in Penn Wynne and animated the full-length film “My Dog Tulip,” based on J.R. Ackerly’s memoir of the same title. Paul, who does the animation, and Sandra, who does the painting, stopped by the Bryn Mawr Film Institute last week to teach a free master class.

It took Paul Fierlinger 50 years to get to the point where he could animate his own full-length feature film, he said.

But despite fantastic reviews and showings at several art theatres around the country, it will likely yield little to no profit. He said that’s the case with almost all movies that aren’t blockbusters—that don’t make their money within the first two to three weeks of showing—because of rampant piracy.

“I came to the decision I’m never going to do this again. When it came to distribution, it’s just gruesome,” he said. “‘Tulip’ can be downloaded from several places on the Internet. Some of them, I hope, will give you viruses.”

Now, Paul and Sandra are working on another animated film, about Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world on his own. They offered the film a number of times to PBS, but it was rejected each time, despite past successes there.

Paul, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said he’s shown his students both “My Dog Tulip” and “Slocum: At Sea with Himself.”

“I showed them “Tulip,” and they walked out of class,” he said. “I showed them this, and their faces were dull and expressionless. This is a generation I don’t make films for… Then I realized they have the blank look of a person who’s reading a book.”

And their latest film plays off that. It’s mostly animated, but words tell the parts of the story the pictures don’t, and Paul provides some narration as well.

He’s hoping with the explosion of the iPad, they will be able to release the film in three-minute segments on a weekly basis—like webisodes—by leasing it to an outlet like New Yorker Magazine. And a friend of Paul’s who teaches economics at Wharton School thinks it’s going to work.

Paul and Sandra are influenced by books and by their own personal stories.

"(Slocum's) story just fascinates me," Paul said during the course. "We would never make a film about anything we don't know well."

Paul says you don’t need school to do what he does, Sandra said.

Sandra said Paul always buys a new piece of equipment when he finishes a project, no matter how much he makes. For example, she and her husband both use Wacom tablets—similar to the pads you use at the store to swipe a credit card and sign for your purchase—to do their animation and painting.

“You can do it without school,” she said. “Make sure you have software, then it’s totally up to your own inspiration.”

She also said working together has given them freedom a large studio wouldn’t have provided.

“Some students freak out and want to work in big groups, but that’s not necessary,” Sandra said. “We have total control."

Attendees of the class watched most of the about 40-minute showing of “Slocum: At Sea with Himself” relatively expressionless, much as Paul Fierlinger had described his college classes, and many showed their interest afterward with questions and comments.

“I’ve seen it in an even rawer version,” said Martha Rich, who took an animation class with Paul at the University of Pennsylvania last semester. “It’s amazing—it’s so beautiful, and the story’s great, too. I like it because it’s not cartoony.  It’s very raw and fresh. It’s not slick. It feels like a human hand is behind it.”