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 Winning Numbers on YouTube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJeDovg3aVk

For temp music, the first thing that came to mind for a lottery backup track was a song used in Robotech for the "Miss Macross" competition, so I slipped that in as temp music. I tried giving the Dad a beard, (trying to give more C&H characters beards in general, because they're usually just mustache'd) and it didn't take. Beards are pretty expensive when you take into account a character turning and looking around, so it makes sense that most of them either have no facial hair, a layer of stubble that can behave around a masking layer, or a mustache.

I went into this knowing that it was the last animatic short that I had been assigned to. The animatic was completed on May 30th of 2018. There was major budget concerns for the studio around that time, what with the "Youtube adpocalypse", and uncertainty all around about what's next for studios. There was gloom over the horizon, but I looked at this short and promised managed my time well- no rough red inks. I was going to do this one right as a send-off.

After this short wrapped, shorts were put on hold in the pre-production pipeline as the producers and partners worked hard to explore new options for revenue to enable weekly shorts again. I tooled around doing art assets here and there for stuff like the News To Me with Chip Chapley segments on Facebook, but ultimately my performance was struggling from the stress and worry. It was some of the worst days of my life and it amplified my anxiety and depression to degrees I don't normally endure, and at this point in time I had completely weened off of the antidepressants. I started taking therapy, but clenched my funds and started preparing reels to brace for the worst.

They decided to lay me off a few months later as work was drying up during this slump period, but kudos to them for trying and fighting for as long as they did- the partners, Rob, Dave, Kris, and Joel were paying out of pocket to keep the studio afloat, and I was the only layoff from the animation department during this period of time in 2018.

It hurt me a lot, but it made sense- Being in pre-production doing animatics and storyboards, and there was nothing new to conceptualize at that time, so I didn't take it personally. Plus the stress and anxiety was causing my performance to slump as well, so...I kinda fucked myself on that one in a few different ways. But I was still depressed and I floundered about for a few months afterwards

I kept in contact, though. I cultivated a family with everyone at Explosm, and I continued to interact and hang out with them. I tried returning to retail, and that was an abysmal mistake. I was reverting. Settling away from a professional career that changed my life. Until one day, Jerald Lewis II, our character designer, had a ticket to go to an Industry Giants meeting that he couldn't attend. He hooked me up with it, and it was the strike on my soul that I needed to get motivated again. It turned me back around to the light. I quit my retail job, put my nose to the grindstone, and out of happenstance, VRV had greenlit Season 4 of the Cyanide & Happiness show, and January 1st of 2019, I was back at my same desk, on the same computer, same Wacom, doing animatics again with my team.

It is August and I am still here.

I hope you enjoyed this :D Now- I may have said this was the last short that I've worked on, and that's true! Chronologically speaking, this is the most recent short I've done to-date. I have one more short to upload that I worked on earlier in 2018 that took a little longer to make and was released after Winning Numbers.

After that, I'll upload animatics I've worked on for The Cyanide & Happiness show. From then on, it'll be something a little different. Something non-Cyanide & Happiness related, for sure, but there's also a possibility that I'll work on shorts for C&H in the very near future. Once the final products are released, I'm in the clear to throw 'em up here as well. Thanks for watching, and I appreciate you taking the time to read all of this. You're all wonderful and beautiful.

Directed by Mike Salcedo
Screenplay by Mike Salcedo
Story by Mike Salcedo and Rob DenBleyker

Featuring the voices of:
Kris Wilson as Boy
Rob DenBleyker as Dad
and Connor Murphy as the Radio announcer

You can find more from me as Phobotech on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube! Follow me there to stay in the loop! Be sure to vote 5 before you leave! Thanks for watching!

-GG-