Digital Fireworks Crash

As an art student, you are often given assignments that are designed to make you think practically. This most often happens in sculpture classes, as things like weight, space, and balance are important to the structural integrity of the piece. As well as your wallet if you go to my school.

There are also some assignments that are designed to teach you not to become attached to your work, such as the Drawing 1 assignment I had where I had to perfectly render a still life and then tear it up to shreds to create a mosaic out of it. There are even classes that are designed to set you up to fail, or at the very least make you grow a thicker skin when given critical feedback.

All three of these things are designed, ultimately, with the intent that you'll use them in your real life practices, be it something artistic or not.

For the last two days, I've been struggling with a problem with my fireworks show I've been working on since the start of December. I'm at the final step, which is to record the thing and then add the soundtrack to the show via a simple video editor. The game, however, doesn't want to co-operate. It has crashed several times during the course of recording the show. I've researched the problem as best as I can only to come to the conclusion now that I must start all over again in order to avoid any bugs that I may have accidentally caused with this overly ambitious project.

Needless to say, that realization does kick me right in the ass to the point of depression and panic of nerd proportions. My best guess now is that the show is too long and too taxing on my computer. To compensate for the length, I will have to use a very limited number of shells in my pallet, which kind of evens out since I designed the show to match the feelings evoked in the soundtrack.

My detachment to my work needs work, but you can see the practicality after being presented with the realization of failure is starting to become part of the process. There's that one baby step towards a different aura, as something like this I would probably brood over for three days after these past two days of trying to figure out what went wrong.

I don't like the idea of starting over, but if it must be done, so be it. Thankfully, the show doesn't have a seasonal due date, unlike the one I just came up with that I want to start and finish before Valentines day. I guess I'll be doing that first when I'm at home and not locked up at my mock animation table I have set up in the newly-claimed Seminar Studio.