Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

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?

I ordered an animation cel from Original Animation Art (Starshine Group).

You had to mail them a check and a description of what you were looking for, and hope for the best.

The first one they sent me was a little bit better than Scratchy's arm, but not by much. I returned it and asked for something with the entire character in it.

They sent Daffy Duck nearly off the edge of the frame with a nasty scowl. Not fun to look at.

For the third try, I asked if I could please have something with the character smiling and in the center of the frame. And they sent a wonderful cel of Porky Pig from A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court!

It looks very much like this one, but only Porky and not the background:

https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-...

That cel must have been from the same scene as mine, as some elements of it are identical, particularly his right hand holding the torch.

Many years later I bought the DVD of this movie, stepped through it and found the exact frame with my cel. Too cool!