I get a kick out of The Critical Drinker and his caustic Scottish humor. He gives his honest reviews from the perspective of someone that genuinely loves movies and wants to see the best films and being made and stories told. For the films that The Drinker does feel fall short of the quality mark, he does offer suggestions on how to improve upon them from a writers perspective. I have observed that he also engages with his audience and colleagues in a genuinely decent sincere way. He maybe crusty and drunk, but he seems like a really good guy. He must be, because he likes dogs.
During downtime between jobs, I try and explore things with TVPaint and different aspects of animation. So I thought about doing some comical animation of The Drinker. The character design is mostly mine with a little input by my mate Tim Watts (check out the his stop motion short film "the Big Story" and Spittin' Image caricatures).
Animator Seti Erfan kindly did a one frame shadow set up for me basted on the Robert Valley tone technique. I animated them for the shot and I can tell you the whole procedure is a massive complex pain in the backside. It's so important to keep learning the various aspects in any business so you can understand and empathize with colleagues down the pipeline. From all my past animation experience, I have a huge respect to the animation assisting teams, especially the crews that work on Robert Valley's jobs doing these difficult tone FX under extremely challenging deadlines.
Thanks to Editor Daniel Budin for his SFX suggestions.
Check out the Critical Drinker here:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker/videos
Click on the link below to see the animation:
