Ahead of Melbourne WebFest 2014 we are profiling all the series in the Official Selection as well as the “Second Look” series.
The pair write, design, animate, compose and direct the show from their bedrooms in London, recording the voices with a cast of five actors, including Chris ‘Crabstickz’ Kendall, and Perrier Award-Winning comedian (and Eastenders regular) Terry Alderton.
The brain child of too many beers, Future Duck promises to make it into your Top 3 “Shows About A Duck That Comes From The Future Who Lives With A Semi-Evolved Whale With Legs And A Thawed-Out Female T-Rex And A Sentient English Muffin.”
How do you finance your series?
The series is 99 per cent self-financed. We paid the actors for a day of their time to record the voices and the rest was just working day and night for about a year for free, while juggling proper jobs and going slowly mad.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome in production?
The show is made entirely by the two of us, Henry Dalton and Paul Cope. We do everything from writing the scripts, to making the artwork, to animating, writing the songs, directing, editing, producing, and even doing the odd (bad) bit of acting. The biggest challenge was probably just trying to juggle that amount of workload. For example, at one point, we finished a shot that had taken three-and-a-half days to make, and recorded the moment for the Making Of video – only for the computer to immediately break and the shot to be lost. We then had to spool back through the Making Of video to find the footage of us celebrating just finishing that shot, in order to then recreate the settings that we’d just been using. We also filmed us doing all that for the Making Of video. It was like being in a really shitty version of Inception.
Is it an ongoing project? If so, can you give us some clues about what comes next?
We just finished Season 1, which has eight episodes, and contains everything from a fight with an evil David Attenborough to a Meatloaf-style power ballad about a Whale searching the globe for his penis. At the moment we’ve had some interest in developing the show for TV, so we’re looking at exploring that, as well entering lovely festivals around the world like Melbourne, and also starting to come up with ideas for Season 2.
Future Duck on the web:
Website: www.FutureDuck.net
Twitter: @Future_Duck
Facebook: facebook.com/FutureDuckShow
Keep up to date with Melbourne Web Fest on twitter: @MelbWebFest
La Trobe University is a festival sponsor of Melbourne WebFest.
