I Am Duck in short, is about a duck (named Duck) trying to find bread. Not so short, I Am Duck is a film about my feelings and experiences in the post undergrad world. I wanted to make films, I wanted to be a better animator, and more importantly, I wanted to (hopefully) make some money while doing it. I was constantly spinning my wheels trying to find work, hoping something would come up and ignoring thoughts or advice from friends and family about how I should proceed to achieve my goals. Or at the very least, to take a second to breathe. Between graduating and making I am Duck, I had moved back home to New Jersey, driven across the country to Los Angeles, then lived in the Bay Area for a few months, moved BACK to Los Angeles, then lived in New York for a month sleeping on a floor and interning in the city, then flying BACK to LA, to drive BACK to New Jersey, then FINALLY moving to Brooklyn. All of this to try to achieve my goals of being an animator.
After screening Duck at a few film festivals, I am always struck by how people interpret the film.
"Its about drug addiction"
(no but I see the parallels)
"its about a breakup"
(kinda, but I'll try to not admit it)
I am Duck is about feeling lost. My goal for this film was to capture a feeling, the events and "character arcs" are less important than how the film makes you feel. Everyone has a bread they are looking for, everyone has an owl they annoy relentlessly, and everyone has a Gull. Everyone is Duck.
Making I Am Duck
In late 2018 I was working at an animation studio in NYC ,Cartuna. We had just wrapped production on two shows and I and a few others were staying on to pick up some odds and ends in production. I took this opportunity to attempt to pitch a few ideas to them. In the meeting with Adam Belfer, the cofounder of Cartuna, I pitched 3 ideas and at the last minute, pitched a forth idea. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to show them the stupid stream of consciousness comic I worked on on and off for a few years and how, hey, it could be something!
Well a few months pass and I get a message from Cartuna saying they want to make that stupid stream of consciousness comic into a short webseries, I Am Duck. Well, now I had the opportunity, but I had to change something that had no real direction and drive into an actual….show?
Pre-production kicked off in early 2019, where I was planning, writing, and boarding the entire show on index cards, drawing thumbnails and writing the script on the lines in the back, by late 2019, I had finally finished a final animatic cut, had recorded voices, had a talented illustrator who was jumping on backgrounds and was ready to start on animation, which eventually wrapped in late 2020, and compositing wrapping in April of 2021.
Throughout production the structure changed drastically. I Am Duck went from a webseries with 15 episodes at 1-2 minutes an episode, to a whale of a short film at a final runtime of 12:30 minutes.
Designs and Pre Production
The final animatic was cobbled together from 15 1-2 min episodes from the original idea. In total it was going to be roughly 16 minutes long but THANKFULLY, a lot of it was cut and for the better. Even still, a good portion of the visuals and some of the edit still changed throughout the production, all the way until the compositing section for some shots.