Basil

I've had another idea.

I'm going to take a sound clip from the sitcom Fawlty Towers and animate the character of Basil Fawlty to the dialogue. He's such a caricature of a man, it's amazing nobody's yet converted his manic character into the cartoon medium.

Here are some rough tests to get to grips with the character. I tried to replicate his face in detail first, in order to fully understand how his eyes look how his eyebrows sit and the relationship between his mouth and his moustache (nonetheless enhancing his distinguishing features), before simplifying it and going straight into a draft run of a piece of character animation.

I imagined a generic Basil scenario: he's in the middle of a stressful situation, and is furiously looking for something - or someone, probably Manuel - but then he notices a resident of the hotel, and has to immediately adopt a jovial facade. The video sweeps by in a couple of seconds, and I've only dwelt on the face, but it's a start.

I'm really looking forward to animating this man.