Lost Keys/Old Projects

Ocean Reflector at DuskThursday night I was chatting with a friend about artwork. She had expressed the desire to teach herself how to draw, eventually in hopes of starting a webcomic. I always love it when people show a desire to learn something new. People, in general, seem far too passive about creativity. We are, after all, a consumer culture. Creating new media can be a difficult role reversal.

During the course of the conversation, we stumbled upon CG and animation. I had done a bit of animation years ago during the InterLock project using Bryce 3 and 4. By today's standards, what I produced was terribly crude. Even today some of the old renders and sketches make me embarrassed. This is not to say that there aren't some images I rather like.

The problem was, I no longer had any of the project files on my machine. When I changed computers in 2004, I decided not to include most of the InterLock files. They instead, resided on a CD backup. I usually make a CD or DVD backup of my files every year. I keep the discs for about three years, and then I throw them away. I had assumed that I had all the files in the last backup, and it wasn't an issue. There was one image in particular I wanted to show her, one that I could see so clearly in my imagination but couldn't externalize it.

I keep most of my immediate CDs in several cases above my computer monitor. In those cases I found three discs, but none of them had the files I was looking for. Determined, I set about digging through every box in my small apartment to see if I had a copy somewhere. a half hour later, I came up empty. Did I really lose the files? Was what little that remained of the InterLock project gone forever? I didn't want to believe it. I had maintained the same file tree for my documents for years now, I even had the path memorized -- or so I thought.

When I went back to the oldest of the discs I had found, I discovered that the files I was looking for weren't in the directory I expected. Instead, they were in a subdirectory of the directory I expected, and curiously overlooked. Inside was a carbon copy of the InterLock website during the height of the project. And there were the images I was looking for.

After so much effort to find them, I thought it would be a shame to hide the images I found. True, they may be old, but some of them were quite nice given the level of technology I was working with. So, I decided to post them in a gallery here.