The Status of Things

It’s been a really, really crazy month for us.  I apologize for us pretty much dropping off the map recently, but a ton of stuff has been happening to us in the last couple of weeks.  As such, I feel like I should at least briefly bring you guys up to speed, and also talk about the future of Earthbound and our other projects.

First of all, our main editing computer completely crashed at the beginning of August.  It was a four-year-old computer, and it wasn’t clear whether its refusal to boot up was due to years of wear on the magnetic disks, or simply a driver error.  After trying various things just to get it to boot up (and failing), we eventually resorted to taking it in to a Best Buy in Tulsa.  A week later, they informed us that the first partition of the hard drive was completely corrupt, but the second partition was safe.  What this meant at the time was that most of our half-finished computer game projects would be gone (as well as a few miscellaneous Earthbound files), but all the raw footage and visual effect files for Earthbound were safe.  After bringing the computer back home, we were able to rig a setup using a new Windows 7 tower from Wal-Mart that read from our old hard drive partitions as massive external disks.

The mutant computer

We quickly transferred everything off of the second uncorrupted partition, then tackled the supposedly corrupt first partition.  CHKDSK hacked away at the first partition for the greater portion of the following night, and the next morning, we were actually able to get into the corrupted partition and access most of the files!  There were still a lot of files that were mysteriously missing, but most of them had been moved to a hidden, protected folder in the C drive called “found001” (which apparently is created by CHKDSK to house files that it found on the corrupted part of the disk).  After sifting through literally over a thousand subfolders with meaningless numbered names, we were able to locate most of the remaining missing files, including pretty much everything Earthbound-related.  At the end of the day, 99% of the files from our old editing computer were salvaged and safely backed up.  I guess the moral of this story is don’t take what the Geek Squad tells you at face value, and don’t ever give up on your data until you can get into the drive for yourself.

But what does this mean for Earthbound?

The bottom line from all this is that no work has been completed on Earthbound for about five weeks.  This sets back our previous release schedule considerably – at this point, it seems that the Earthbound Part Two DVD will most likely be finished somewhere near the end of September or the beginning of October.  Meanwhile, Earthbound Episode 6, which was previously predicted to be finished around Christmas of this year, may get pushed back to early 2013, depending on how much time I can find to finish the visual effects.

Which brings me to my next major point – I have finally moved away from home for good, which is both exciting and deeply melancholy all at the same time.  Living in Alva, Oklahoma for the first 22 years of my life was great, but now I’m living in Kansas City, Missouri, where I’ll be developing software for Cerner.  It’s not quite the dream video game developer job yet, but it will definitely help me pay this newfound thing called “the bills.”

Joining the real world doesn’t mean the end of Ridgway Films, and certainly not the end of Earthbound.  If you followed our earlier posts from the summer, Earthbound has been (more or less) completely shot, so all that remains is to throw in the visual effects.  So don’t worry about that – regardless of how long it takes, Earthbound will get completed.  Plus Best Served Cold (formerly Three Day Weekend) is still coming down the pipeline.  There are also a ton of backlog videos to entertain for quite a while, which I’ll be uploading in the near future.  And we’re all still talking about what other future film projects we may work on together as soon as time permits.  The frequency of videos will probably diminish, but that’s been happening for a while now.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re by no means signing off from making videos, but I wanted to make the few of you that still read this blog aware of the changes going on behind the scenes so you can adjust your expectations accordingly.

Anyway, on a lighter note, Earthbound is, in fact, still coming!  I’ll update you guys as soon as the new DVD is ready to ship, which will be the next major thing to look forward to.

Also, here’s the final Episode 7 production video update from the end of July.  This video is fairly old but we never got around to posting it on here, so here you go!