I'm actually going to cry.
My anger is wound up in my belly like a coiled snake writhing in fury.
Here's the story...
I read a lot of the comments on 9th Wonders about Staz Johnson's effort on the final War Buddies. One comment that really got me was the badly filtered photo effort of the Pentagon. Someone remarked that panel really hurt after appreciating all the detail in my stuff.
I got all fired up and said to myself, "Well they ain't seen nothing yet!"
For two days I drew this page. It put me behind my deadline, but I was giving it my all. I drew this panoramic New York street at night. Every window in every building. Every piece of relief sculpture on the sides of the buildings. Cars. Lights. Reflections. Everything.
Next panel Hana dances in a club. Not only is she lovingly rendered (one of my favourite likenesses) but I decided to draw all the runner-up Hana dress designs on all the girls dancing around Hana. I painstakingly drew every dress as accurately as I could.
Finally the page was over. I couldn't be happier. It is/was (you sensing where this is going?) one of the most detailed pages I'd ever done. I shrunk it down to email size and sent it off to Frank. I then noticed something I'd missed (a bit of rough rendering I think) and went to fix it up. After fixing it up, I thought I better save it again. That's when I realised that I was working on the compressed copy. I was horrified, but that's ok, I saved it already right? Wrong.
So instead of a 28.3x43cm 300dpi file I had a 20x30cm 150dpi file. What's the difference you might ask? 108MB of information vs. 16.7MB. That's about 15% of the information I had before. Now while I uncompressed it and did what I can to fix it, it's about 60% of the page it was.
Two days work. 60% of what it should be.
THE.
ONE.
PAGE.
I.
KILLED.
MYSELF.
ON.
Any other page... Any other page I would have been ok with. Just not this one.
I'm a litte unhappy...
11 comments:
Jas,
OMG, man, I really feel for you. That is so frustrating, especially when you put so much time into it. What is your plan, are you going to redraw it, use it as is, try to salvage it ... or go crawl in a hole? Geez, that really bites.
BTW, I know the page isn't full and it's hard to see through the fade and message, but you can tell that your spend forever on this page. Hana's dress looks like it'll be awesome (and what a clever idea to draw all the runner-up dresses anyway -- now there's a guy who tries to please fans! The Petrelli and Corinthian ads look really great. And even though I was kidding about the green with blue stripes, you put them in -- dude, you just rock! (I'm very flattered.)
I really hope it all works out for you.
My heart is breaking for you. What a loss of your time and energy.
Jason, I can relate. I was running out of disk space many years ago on my music computer and bought a new drive. I installed it and proceeded to format it. All my music was on drive D:. Years of midi and audio files that were backed up on tape. The new drive should have been drive E: so I proceeded to format it. No probs. Went to run my music program and access some of the files. Nothing. No files. When the new disk was installed, the software installed it as D: and the old disk was bumped down to E:. I bought software meant to retrieve disks that had been accidentally formatted and was able to retrieve about 60% of the data. All audio files were so mixed up they were useless. The tape backups were somehow unreadable. Gone, gone gone! Only remnant was scratch mixdown tapes. Learned my lesson. Ditched the old non-working tape backups in favor of saving all files after each days work to alternating CD-RW and now DVD-RW. If something is found to be screwed up, I can go back to a previous backup and find it. So I can empathize with your pain. Unfortunately most image processing software does not prompt you to back up your work so it's up to you to maintain a workable backup scheme.
Sometimes though some good can come out of it. Your new work can sometimes be better than the original so put your smiley face on, chock it up to one more life lesson learned and do your best. We know it will be awesome!
OMG I'm soooooo sorry!!!!
Rinibini
damn jason. i can relate to that feeling.
[lost half of my final thesis in an important class in college]
i'm sure that whatever you have will be outstanding. you are an amazing artist. but still, i am so sorry.
dreaux~
GUH. Dude, you need a hug. That is so awful. Wow. I'm curious too, what are you going to do with it now?
Awww, seriously. Ugh. Good luck with this, from the bottom of my heart.
-Leshia
Really sorry to hear that, Jason :(
I had something similar happen in school. I lost a 10 page research paper that I'd been working on non-stop (I seriously didn't sleep) before it was due and I lost the entire thing after about page 1 because I had left it open on my computer the whole time. Some idiot kid had pulled the lever on the outside of the apartment building that controls the power to about 16 apartments :S
I really do hope that everything works out all right for you. If the ghosty previews are any indication, these are going to be the best novels yet!!
-Toni
Oh, Jason, I'm so sorry. I can feel your frustration. And it's so much worse when you haven't got anyone else to blame! I hate that feeling.
Your idea with the dresses was wonderful. What a terrific tribute to the fans! I can't wait to see them, no matter what you manage to do with the page.
Despite your frustration and exhaustion, we know that your work was amazing. Hang in there.
I can't offer any kind of technical assistance, knowing as little about computers as I do, but I'm here for moral support. If you get to the "I'm about to put my fist through the monitor" stage, feel free to just blame me for the whole problem. I can take it. :)
CurlyMarie,
Indestructible Cheerleader For a Day
Oh no! Oh dear god I hate it when that happens. :( Nothing worse under the sun, I can't count how many times I've lost major assignments mere moments before they're due.
Oh, mate, just don't stare at it for too long. Go out for a run or something, distract yourself, if you're not already doing it, just don't stare at the screen for hours.
And if anyone says "you should have backed up more," or anything close, you have the right to punch them.
Yeah, this was totally forshadowing what ended up happening me today! I jinxed myself by having read this, lol. I was about 95% done with, what would have been, my favorite piece of tablety goodness yet. Peter. Jumping off the roof. I worked on it for about an hour and a half, was about to do the last bit of shading, and then work on the bg. I took a screencap to show a friend what I was working on so I didn't have to send him the massive pic (1600x1200 - I was planning on using it as a wallpaper), when, as I was opening paint to save it as a quick .jpg, the program I was using closed on me! I had been trying to hit 'save' and my computer lagged and thought I was trying to close it, so instead of prompting me to save, closed anyway :S So yeah, all I'm left with is this like 500x500 .jpg of an unfinished pic.
:(
awww... man...
thanks guys.
acidburn133... I'm sorry to hear about your art-loss too. =(
Post a Comment