Today was one of those days on which nothing seemed to be working…. The computer was slow and I was slower. My aim was to take the prehistoric creatures for my feature on evolutionary “missing links” which aren’t actually missing – and set them into scenes – combining photos and 3d to create virtual photographs of these extinct creatures.
I looked through some of my collection of natural history photos for inspiration – I’m trying to create not just mugshots of extinct animals, but real shots as that give a feeling for how the creatures and the world they inhabited might of worked… I even have a list of shots I want to create – a flock of microraptors turned mostly to blur as they cross between trees – a mud caked version of the first fish to crawl onto land – a dimetrodon advancing labourously over a sand dune.
However, I realised by lunch time that today isn’t the day this is going to happen. The computer kept crashing on rendering and my brain really wasn’t up to figuring out why. With no deadline, it wasn’t as though I HAD to make it work, so I resolved to hang back and wait until I could do it properly (probably Tuesday)…
I de-clogged my email, desk, computer and brain instead… the fact that I’ve always got a deadline and at least two or three projects on the go means I hardly ever do the basic tidying up things that I need to keep my brain and work area free from clutter. Those bits of paper floating around the office floor and desk – the emails I’m supposed to have replied to – the sticky notes, both real and virtual - and all the things I really need to have written on sticky notes but haven’t got around to writing slow me down in just the same way that leaving 20 web pages open and having 100 icons on my desktop slows the computer down. They clog the memory and take processing time away from the task at hand.
A tidy office is a luxury I can rarely afford, but at the end of today I have one, and that, I guess makes it a good day.
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