Well, it seems I made a mistake. Rather than revoking my frontpage privileges, they moved it to once every two weeks instead of once a week. So there's some good news. Now, this doesn't mean I'm only going to post Cartoon Production Updates once every two weeks, I'm still going to post them once a week, but you'll have to come to my profile and check it to see it, and not rely on the frontpage. Anyway, let's get down to business, shall we?

Christmas in Jimtopia-
Approximate Percentage: 45%
Current Runtime: 42.1 Seconds
Estimated Release Date: Dec. 14th

Now, I have some good news, and some bad news about the cartoon; let me start from the beginning.

I began making this cartoon so that I could enter it in the 2007 Christmas contest. It was coming along smoothly, but every update Tom made I failed to see anything about the Christmas contest. So I did a bit of searching, and found a post Tom made in the Halloween 2007 contest thread stating it was canceled this year. Honestly, I was a bit pissed, but really there was nothing I could do; plus he created this site, if it wasn't for him I probably wouldn't be animating, so really, I was being kind of ungrateful. Okay, moving on, I decided, instead of entering the Christmas contest this year, I'd just make it my cartoon a regular old Jim cartoon (and hopefully get frontpage again). So I shortened the song length to about a minute and 30 seconds, which is now going to be the length of the cartoon, rather than the original estimate 2 minutes and 30 seconds. So there's some info about it; hopefully no one will be too devastated by this information.

In real life news, I believe that I am going to be getting a tablet this Christmas, which means I will finally be able to draw out my characters. This does not mean that I will be abandoning Jim, or his Pals in any way, it just means I'll be moving into other forms of animation potentially, which I am very excited about. Another neat thing is that I have been experimenting with Flash MX and Flash CS3 at school, and at home, and have begun to get a grasp of how to draw/animate stuff. I'm really getting the hang of it quickly (If you didn't know, I don't use Flash to animate my cartoons currently, I use KoolMoves). I really began to start wanting to use Flash MX and CS3 when I found out I got accepted into college (for animation) and that Flash is the software they use. Obviously I wanted to get my bearings in the program before doing anything, and I think I've begun doing some good preparation.

In closing, enjoy this screenshot for the week, and keep checking back for more once-a-week updates!

~Jimtopia

(It seems Jim's hat has been burnt)