I spent most of today compositing all my reference imagery into one file to layout the mural I'm working on. Holy smokes! Its a huge file! 202 megabytes to be exact. At one point I had to delete some of my music off my hard drive just so I could save. Rest assured, all my music and files are carefully backed up on my external hard drive. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in this world - those who back up and those who will.

Side note: So after we had finished compositing the whole movie, "A Scanner Darkly," in after effects, it took up pretty close to 600gigs of memory across six hard drives. Each hard drive w/ one twenty minute reel. At 23.976 frames per seconds, that's a lot of pictures!

Anyway, one imporant criteria that I had to consider while designing this mural was to make sure each artist was close to the same size, so not to offend anyone by making them feel less "important." This can be tricky because while I am trying not to bring focus to any one person, my fear was that there wouldn't be anything to grabs the viewer or lead them into the picture. Thus making it less memorable and more difficult to "read." So I tried to pick imagery that was engaging and surprising, while still portraying their personality with some accuracy. Once I get this stage approved, the next step will be to finish a small scale illustration using the approved reference as a guide. Which should take a couple days at least. If that goes smoothly, then I can begin to execute the mural. yay!