The last frames of the film are just patterns on black, the background flashing fast like a distress call in Morse code, followed by the tap tap tap of the end of the reel knocking against the projector with every revolution. I paid attention to most of it. The four of them on their red-and-white boat, having a picnic, Sophia playing with jacks, Mr. T and six-year-old Ben fishing off the side, Mrs. T sunbathing in a floral-patterned bikini top that I’m going to have to fuck around with in Illustrator for ages.

I flip the lights, switch off the projector and camera, roll the mouse, and get started.

I do the stupid boobs first. I’m pretty good at this now—it’s really a matter of playing with circles and half spheres. It’s the pattern and the shading, and getting them to move fluidly from frame to frame, that’s the challenge. She turns around for thirteen seconds. I clip this part out and play with it in a second file. Thirteen seconds, three hundred and twelve frames. Three hundred and twelve frames that I’m pretty much ruining. I mean, what a cutie. I almost feel bad doing it until I realize that a) she’s paying me to do it, b) no one else is going to pay me to do anything, c) it’s not like I’m actually giving anyone fake boobs, just making the fake boobs she already has a bit more real by letting her pretend that the swollen bulbs she hauls around all day in Bloomingdale’s ivory bras were always that way, and that some failure of gravity keeps them floating just south of her chin (they’re higher than mine, and I’m a teenager, for Christ’s sake), and d) no one is ever going to watch these films anyway.

The digital copy looks pretty good. There are places where it jitters, which makes me uneasy. The edges of objects in the foreground seem almost overdrawn, like the outlines of a cartoon, while in the background the horizon is vague. But not bad, really. It’s called generation loss—you inevitably get some when you transfer analog to digital. All you can do is be careful with the aspect ratio and the recording speed. You never transmit in exactly the way you receive—the playback is always different. But that’s life. And with all my tampering, what’s a little generation loss?