Friday, August 11, 2006
I love it when I fuck myself
So, I got this thing going at work, doing artwork for Back To School trivia. Trivia games like that are a double-edged sword; on the one hand, they have a shelf life of about a day, so why bother with anything special? On the other hand, it's a good excuse to come up with some really nice pieces for my portfolio. That's the approach I was taking with this one.
So after I spent yesterday on the various assets, today I spent about four hours working on the desk on which those assets would appear. It came out pretty decently; I'm getting pretty good at creating artwork in Flash, if I do say so myself. But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself:
Alex Ross has nothing to worry about, but not bad, eh? I'm happy with it. I better be happy with it, and I'll tell you why.
The image above is not the original; the original is full of layers and vectors and masks and all that other Flash stuff I didn't understand when I started this job. This is just a flat image that I managed to export before I fucked myself. See, I was working in Flash. I did something, and it froze up. So I waited for it to unfreeze. I worked on some other stuff. Occasionally checked back with Flash--nope, still frozen. So finally I forced it to quit, so could reopen it and not do the thing I did that made it freeze.
That's when I found out I hadn't saved for several hours.
All that work, completely obliterated. If I wasn't sharing the office with the rest of the team I would have started throwing things, Keith Moon-style. As it is, I may still crawl under my desk. So hopefully I won't have to change the color of the desk, or adjust the angle of the seatback slightly, because that means, essentially, starting over from scratch.
The moral? SAVE YOUR FUCKING WORK. And really, that's more of a warning to myself; you're probably smart enough to hit ctrl+s every few minutes.
Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen
So after I spent yesterday on the various assets, today I spent about four hours working on the desk on which those assets would appear. It came out pretty decently; I'm getting pretty good at creating artwork in Flash, if I do say so myself. But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself:
Alex Ross has nothing to worry about, but not bad, eh? I'm happy with it. I better be happy with it, and I'll tell you why.
The image above is not the original; the original is full of layers and vectors and masks and all that other Flash stuff I didn't understand when I started this job. This is just a flat image that I managed to export before I fucked myself. See, I was working in Flash. I did something, and it froze up. So I waited for it to unfreeze. I worked on some other stuff. Occasionally checked back with Flash--nope, still frozen. So finally I forced it to quit, so could reopen it and not do the thing I did that made it freeze.
That's when I found out I hadn't saved for several hours.
All that work, completely obliterated. If I wasn't sharing the office with the rest of the team I would have started throwing things, Keith Moon-style. As it is, I may still crawl under my desk. So hopefully I won't have to change the color of the desk, or adjust the angle of the seatback slightly, because that means, essentially, starting over from scratch.
The moral? SAVE YOUR FUCKING WORK. And really, that's more of a warning to myself; you're probably smart enough to hit ctrl+s every few minutes.
Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen