01.19.04

Wow. It's been a while since I've written anything about the progress on Zero_Sum File 2. Three months to be exact. What have I been doing all that time, you might wonder?

Not much on this project, that's safe to say. Shortly after I made the last update way back when, my laptop got sick. The LCD screen, which had been showing a few symptoms of illness (flickering, dead pixels), finally decided to get my attention by simply going black one night while I was working. After restarting the machine to affirm that, yes, the screen was indeed dead (or near enough -- you could just make out hazy shadows on screen if you tilted it far enough), I contacted the nice people at Apple and told them that my machine needed help. After making me perform tedious tests ("Now hold option-apple-shift-return-p, jump up and down while holding your breath, and tell me what happens..."), they finally agreed and let me send the poor thing in for treatment. About a week later, I had a shiny new screen, and I do mean *shiny*. That was the brightest screen I'd ever seen. If they have computer screens in Heaven, they must be like that. The brightest, purest white you'll ever see. I almost needed to wear shades to use the thing. However, they say that the candle that burns twice as bright shines half as long, and they certainly know what they're talking about (that's them for you). A week later, I was witness to the strangest occurence I'd ever seen on a computer screen. While I was working, the contents of the screen froze and literally appeared to be eaten in a flash of glowing white light. The screen became a uniform sheet of briliant white in a matter of seconds. Shocked, I quickly restarted the machine, only to receive that blank screen, shining bright as the sun. I called the nice people at Apple again to inform them that they had done their job too well. When I had sent it in, I had had a screen that was too dark to see anything. Now, I had a screen too bright to see anything. I asked if I could get something in the middle. Without hesitation, they agree to give it another go, and my machine went back for futher repairs. A few days later, I got back a machine back in working order, and it's stayed that way ever since (knock on wood).

Now, those problems meant I was without a computer for almost a month's time, so I was behind a quite a few things, and Zero_Sum went on the back burner. It stayed there during the hectic holidays and a recent case of the sniffles.

However, I finally dusted off the old files and resolved to get things back on track this weekend. The extremely short animation above is the result. Now, the first piece of animation is behind me and the long road towards the final animation begins. Hopefully, there won't be too many more roadblocks like the one I described above. I'm thankful that I listed the release date as simply "2004" in the teaser -- that gives me until midnight of December 31st to deliver the thing on schedule. Not that it should take that long...

[k]