The Critical Drinker

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 stories told. For the films that The Drinker does feel fall short of the quality mark,  he does offer constructive 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 respectful sincere way. He maybe crusty and drunk, but I reckon he's a really good guy.  He must be, he likes dogs.

During downtime between jobs, I try and explore things with TVPaint and different aspects of animation. So I thought about doing a comical animated shot of The Drinker. The character design is mostly mine with a little input by my colleague Tim Watts (check out the his stop motion short film "the Big Story" and Spittin' Image caricatures).

My buddy FX Animator Raymond Pang did a tone suggestion on one drawing of the Drinker. I Then asked another friend Animator Seti Erfan if she could help me by doing a one frame shadow set up  based on Ray's image following the Robert Valley tone technique. With that guide I then animated the tone shadows for the entire shot.  I can tell you the whole procedure is a massive complex pain in the backside. In short, its multi layers of FX work to keep track of per drawing.

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 2-D 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 shadows under extremely challenging deadlines.

Thanks to Editor Daniel Budin for his SFX suggestions.

Check out the Critical Drinker's youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker/videos

Click on the link below to see the animation: