A Blackadder-inspired General brought to life in Blender’s Grease Pencil — simple layered face animation and line wobble. Blender, Clip Studio Paint and DaVinci Resolve.
The General and the chocolate biscuit prank
The General was an exercise to learn Blender’s Grease Pencil and test lip-sync techniques. I’d already recorded the audio during a livestream as part of an OBS mic plugin test, so it ended up being the perfect length to use.
Now, I have a habit of rambling on — opening my mouth before I’ve actually thought about anything — and sometimes strange things come out. This recording is a prime example. After listening back (which genuinely made me laugh), I’m pretty sure it was influenced by the Blackadder Season 4 character General Melchett, played by the legendary Stephen Fry. And when I think about it further, it’s actually a blend of General Melchett and the Season 2 character Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Simon Jones — especially his line: “Well, on Tuesdays he’s normally in bed with the Captain.”
The General original audio recording from obs
We’d recently rewatched all of Blackadder (Series 1 to 4), so that’s most likely where the inspiration came from.
That’s exactly what sparked the animated character, which is obviously based on General Melchett. I found a screenshot from a scene in Series 4 to use as reference.
I started with a static drawing of the character, then used the line wobble effect, with the face broken into separate layers — which meant the face was basically all I needed to animate. Nice and simple as a starting point. I also added a slow camera zoom to bring in a bit of extra motion.
The line wobble is a built-in Grease Pencil function. It mimics the 2–3 frame wobble that’s traditionally achieved by drawing multiple separate but very similar frames.
Once the animation was finished, I rendered it out as individual frames (1920 × 1080 px PNGs) and imported them into DaVinci Resolve. Extra background audio was also added at this stage, such as the bomb and gun noise.
A quick tip: make sure your DaVinci project and timeline are set to the same frame rate you used in Blender. Otherwise, your audio will slowly drift out of sync. Sounds silly, yes — but I forget often enough that it’s worth the reminder.
Programs used:
Clip Studio Paint Ex
Blender 4.4
DaVinci Resolve 18.6
Click for the youtube shorts version
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