This is owned by Explosm Entertainment, but I drew and animated everything here! This is an animatic, not the final animation, but if you're interested in how it turned out, click here to watch Good Dog on YouTube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC3_hHiXgSA

This one was special to me because it was my return to shorts after what felt like a lifetime away from them.

All of the shorts I've submitted so far took place in the tail-end of 2015 and into 2016. For the rest of that year, I was busting ass with the rest of the team on Season 3 of the Cyanide & Happiness show. I'll be sure to post those animatics after I've gone through this list of shorts first, but it was a challenging experience that really helped form me as a professional. I grew and learned a lot from it.

Immediately after Season 3 of the show, I was also assigned to work on a show from Explosm called Purgatony. It was a refreshing change of pace from the usual stick figures that we drew, but the deadlines were extremely intensive. No fault of anyone's at Explosm, it was specifically for a weird streaming service called "Blackpill" which kept dragging their feet signing the contract while the deadline didn't move...it's a wonder those guys aren't in business anymore.

Having just come off from the pressure of season 3, and now into an even more intensive project, I was suffering burnout like crazy.

I worked on the introduction sequence to Purgatony and the first four episodes, before I was mercifully put back onto shorts while two animators hopped on to help out with the rest of the season. At the time it was a saving grace, and I had a sour opinion about Purgatony because of the stress, but in hindsight, it was actually a really fun project to work on. I'm happy that I got to try something new, and looking back on it, I really grew and matured because of it.

As I type this, Explosm finally got the rights back to Purgatony, and they're releasing it on Youtube for free. After two years, seeing how the final product came out (apparently the French animation studio had tight deadlines too) it came out pretty good! The first episode is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocBEaoW5okc

So Good Dog, which I think was completed around March of 2017, was an opportunity to return to form. Producers were quick to point out that I had been over-detailing animatics in the past, so sometimes, throughout Season 3, I would revert to what I called "Redline" which was a loose approximation to how a character should look. It was meant to be fast and sloppy. Some of that exists here, and the entirety of the dog is bluelined because I wasn't sure what design they were going to go for. There was uncertainty if there was an existing dog rig they could re-use for the short, but Jerald, our character designer, wound up creating a dog based on what I drew here.

Directed by Dave McElfatrick
Screenplay by Joel Watson
Story by Joel Watson, Dave McElfatrick, Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, and Michael Rousselet

Featuring the voices of:
Trisha Romo as the Lady
and Joel Watson as the Blind Man and Barking Dog

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