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Filmmaker Jim Blashfield's metier is an extremely painstaking one —cutout animation, where the moving images are created frame by frame in a collagelike manner, with thousands of still photos and photocopies instead of hand-drawn cells. His videos for Talking Heads, Paul Simon and others put him in the forefront of the medium, so he wasn't surprised to get the call from Michael Jackson's people. What did surprise him was the freedom he was given. "When I got asked to do this video, our one guideline was to make something about Michael's public idiosyncrasies," says Blashfield. "Remarkably enough, he decided at this point it would be good to allow some fun to be had." (The recent fracas over Jackson's alleged private idiosyncrasies throws a cruelly ironic shadow over this decision.) So Blashfield constructed his stunning animated collages around all the tabloid rumors dogging Jackson, creating sequences on M.J.'s supposed shrine to Liz Taylor ("We discovered one great moment in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that allowed us to have her walk through the scene in full motion"), his bid to buy the Elephant Man's bones and more. "It was the most elaborate piece I had ever done, and everything was done under the camera —there was no video post-production involved at all." The idea of Jackson touring the giant amusement park was there from the very beginning, but making a giant-size Jackson represent the park itself was an inspiration that came after three weeks of brain wracking. "After that, I got a much better handle on the whole thing," Blashfield says. "The video became a kind of commentary about the structures everyone builds around themselves and the possibility that they'll eventually discover they don't like that existence" —hence the Gulliver-like M.J. breaking free at the end. As for the star himself, Blashfield says: "My only worry was that we had only two and a half days to shoot with him, and there was the possibility of his being distracted with other business. But he was always there, very professional and easy to work with."