For a dozen south-metro high school students, Thursday was the day their work hit the big screen.

Okay, so it was a total of nine seconds of film, but it was a really big screen.

The students, who are taking an intensive animation course at Rosemount High School, got a rare opportunity last week to see their own hand-drawn cartoons projected on the six-story screen of the Minnesota Zoo's Imax Theatre -- the biggest screen in the Upper Midwest, the theater boasts.

The students put in more than a week of painstaking work to produce three clips, using permanent markers to draw directly on strips of Imax film that the theater's projection booth manager, Rodney Johnson, gave the class.

The film rolls at 24 frames per second, so students had to fill 72 frames to produce three seconds of animation.

The cartoons are hardly Disney blockbuster material, but they each pack as much story as you'd think possible into three seconds: One shows a cat stalking a mouse. In another, a giant hand reaches down to grab a kid with a suitcase. A guy with an umbrella gets struck by lighting in the third.

The project got started last year after Rosemount teacher Mark Hubbard brought a group of students to tour the Apple Valley theater. Johnson, who has studied film, said he'd always thought it would be neat to draw on Imax film, which is ten times larger than the 35-millimeter film you'd find in a traditional camera. "When I was in high school, I remember drawing on 16-millimeter frames," he said. "An Imax film frame, it's gigantic. You can actually see what you're doing."

And it just so happens he has a lot of Imax film lying around. Every movie that's shipped to the theater comes in 30 or 40 small reels, each of which starts and ends with a few feet of blank frames that Johnson cuts off as scrap.

Hand-drawing on film is an old-school technique, but one that gave the students a chance to see their work projected by equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also gave them good practice working in teams, said Lucas Rasmussen, a senior who said he's going to the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in the fall. "There's a lot of group work in the animating field."

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016