Casualties of Animation: Where'd My Files Go?

Earlier this week I discovered that my personal work drive at the office had been mistakenly wiped by a freelancer.  Everything from the 88-Keys music video to the recent work I've done with Locksley to everything else that I've photoshopped/animated/recorded/etc in past two and a half years was gone in mere seconds .... or was it?

Kind of.

I ran disc recovery software and it recovered quite a bit of information, actually.  People told me I was lucky to get the data back... but I think that's only about half-true at most.  While I did recover about 234 gigabytes of data; what were once neatly organized files, folders and sub-folders are all now proprietarily named and mish-mashed together.

And there are 1.4 million of them.

Anyone want to be my intern for a few months to sort this all out?  Eh?

Casualities of Animation Part 1 - Gastritis

I know I can speak for the majority of animators & graphic artists when I say that we all sacrifice a lil' somethin-somethin for our careers. Some of the more common consequences involve moderate to severe weight gain, a little too much hair in and around the keyboard & eating ramen noodles well after graduating college. These are things that we all must deal with in order to convincingly render a sack of flour feeling sad on screen.

In other words, we as animators do some of the most important work in the world.

In the day following another late night at work, I had a sudden loss of appetite & some mild stomach pain which quickly escalated into a fever & what felt like performing sepuku from the inside out by nightfall. Days passed and things only got uglier... things that I'm not quite willing to share in a blog on the internet (yet). Incapacitated by the end of the weekend, I finally went to the hospital to get things checked out. What I initially thought was food poisoning turned out to be something called gastritis. According to the handy lil' fact sheet that the doctor provided me, gastritis is caused by ingesting too much spicy food, medications, consumption of alcohol, drinking too much caffeine and "emotional distress." It's not quite an ulcer, but probably worse than taking part in the Hollywood Diet.

Well... at least I wasn't on any medications?

It didn't help that listing the causes of gastritis was basically like reading a summary of my day-to-day routine, and since I've found it easier to work without burning kidneys... I have since modified what goes into me on a regular basis. Gone are the days of red bull and coffee, my friends. I've had a few cups of tea when things get rough, but for the most part I have actively avoided caffeine.

As for the spicy food, stress and beer... maybe next year?