McCay's self-financed "Lusitania" took nearly two years to complete. With the assistance of John Fitzsimmons and Cincinnati cartoonist William Apthorp "Ap" Adams, McCay spent his off hours drawing the film on sheets of cellulose acetate (or "cels") with white and black India ink at McCay's home. It was the first film McCay made using cels, a technology animator Earl Hurd had patented in 1914; it saved work by allowing dynamic drawings to be made on one or more layers, which could be laid over a static background layer, relieving animators of the tedium of retracing static images onto drawing after drawing. McCay had the cels photographed at the Vitagraph studios. The film was naturalistically animated, and made use of dramatic camera angles that would have been impossible in a live-action film.