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> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something l
by registeredcorn 1y ago
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes.
Let's say I do the following:
1) I take a photograph of a flower
2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production
3) I crop and resize it
With each step, copies of the image are made.
After that, I export to several file types.
Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day.
Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later.
Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact.
To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?