Also, take the time to visit www.elliotelliotelliot.com

Monday, October 24, 2005

Drink, Drink, Drink

The Eurovision Art contest theme this month is "Drunk" and in keeping with the theme I've actually got some animation to post.
8 years or so ago, I had the pleasure to work the the Tasmanian Commisioner for Licencesing on a series of animated commercials targeting poor behaviour in pubs - the program was for The Responsible Service of Alcohol.
Initially they wanted to do a thing about how if you drink and drive you'll end up as a smear on the road, but I don't personally think those hard hitting commercials work that well, and besides which, there are a glut of them on air.
Instead I suggested the very notion that if we tell people what the information is, then at least the punters are informed.
I don't think there is any media based commercials that discourage too many people from drink driving, smoking, taking drugs - whatever.
So I created this character that simply ended up being called Blob.
He's a bad tempered kind of everyman/woman.
This particular commercial targets folks who are having a party: I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia if you have a party and everyone gets blind and drives home and kills themselves, then you are ultimately responsible.
This was animated in the same style as the others - in Painter and at the time Photoshop (once I got After Effects I made use of that).
It was made in about a day (timelines are tight in regional television).
Most of my friends think it's hilarious that I was so involved with these commercials (I'm hardly a drunk but I do like a drink).
I'll simply point out the same thing the Commissioner pointed out to us - it's the Responsible Serving of Alcohol, not the Responsible Drinking of Alcohol.
I apologise that this is in the wrong aspect ratio, but you'll get the idea (actually, the viewing window gives you the opportunity to watch it in widescreen which fixes the problem).
BLOB HAS A PARTY

3 comments:

Elliot Cowan said...

Thanks Mik.
I'll post some more in the future.

giles said...

Excellent...really love the bit where the guy turns off the light and closes the door and the whole screen turns black.

Elliot Cowan said...

Cheers Giles.
They were fun commercials to work on.
I got to do the lot from go to whoa so they were my little babies.

 
Blog Directory - Blogged