Fourth of July

[Dawn M. Kravagna]

Hi. I spent most of July 3rd drawing and creating in Flash a Fourth of July cartoon featuring my character, Crazy Cal, dancing on top of a fire cracker with fireworks popping behind him. I was working in Flash CS4 for the first time and was having some difficulty adjusting to the new upgrade. So I was up till 3AM on the 4th, posting my cartoon. Tested it out on a MAC and PC and "YIKES" doesn't show in the browsers. At 3AM I wasn't in any mental state to figure out what was wrong. Well, my .swf version was too new and apparently the browsers available to me aren't upgraded for CS4, which means that most of my viewers at CattleCapers.com wouldn't be either. So I spent some time in the early afternoon, before having a picnic lunch with my family, exporting to an earlier flash .swf file that would be visible on most browsers. So, for a few hours, my website was a big blank. And...turns out one of my friends commented back to me that there was nothing there. So even on a holiday someone's watching.

These things always take longer than I planned, which was why I was scrambling to finish. Am eager to try a rotating globe next and am working to update my site.

As you can see, I haven't really figured out how to spiffy up my CrimeSpace site yet. I'm really an artist/writer, but am being forced to adapt to the new technology or be left in the dust. I've found some great books and teaching myself, as I have to learn these new skills after work and between my other projects. Fortunately, I've always loved animation so that helps to motivate me. I'm not a big programming buff, but I have some aptitude toward languages, so I'm trying to teach myself actionscript 3.0.

Unfortunately, I've met too many cartoonists not willing to adapt, and they are suffering financially for their inflexibility--or worse, sadly.

For some odd reason, I've always wanted to create an old style, rubber hose cartoon. I've got to create the music, firstly, for my characters to dance to.

Lastly, I'm bummed that I forgot that the new season of Eureka started last Friday. I missed it! One of the few shows on TV that I'll set aside whatever projects I'm working on to watch. I like the combination of spoof and SciFi.