The Wizard and the Mason ...and the Lesson of Backing Up

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a cautionary tale of woe.

Well yes, there's that tale.  But I have another, behind-the-scenes tale: Back in April, during some down-time after a Smurfs screening, I decided to put together a short story to use to update my portfolio.  Diving into the archives of leftover stories I had from college, I found one about Merlin and King Arthur fighting over a girl, which seemed good since Smurfs was also set in Medieval Times.  I wouldn't have to switch gears too much.  So I moved forward fairly quickly, reworking the story, designing characters, and storyboarding.  Drawing primarily while at work, I didn't want to save a copy of any of my story locally on my work computer, so my trusty ol' portable flash drive held all my data.  But I'm no fool! I would come home most days and transfer the files to my personal computer.

Most days...

Turns out the flash drive is kind of old.  And glitchy.  I started to notice that I would try to delete a file or folder and it wouldn't allow me to.  Or I could delete the contents of a folder and then not the folder itself.  And then one day it started to happen...files were just gone.  Back when I was also doodling the cute versions of Marvel's Avengers and Ninja Turtles, I had also done a Spiderman set of doodles that was unfortunately lost.  But the worst thing...while trying to open it one day, I found out that the file I had been saving for storyboards was actually corrupted!  No issue, I would just use the one I had saved on my computer at home.......the one I had just saved over with the corrupted file!

*BUM! BUM! BUM!*

Long story short, I went out and found a program that could "repair" corrupted Photoshop files, and it was actually able to recover the layers in one form or another.  Some assembly was required, of course.  I had to do some inversions, some rescaling, some trashing.  It was rough and felt very unnecessary for something that I didn't really care that much about.

I never finished the final boards.  But I did roughly reassemble everything with my rough boards.  So the story exists below!  I've since moved on to other things that I hope to share soon.  It just felt wrong to never share it with the world.  I mean, that's what the internets are for, after all!!  So...