Working With Expert Illustrators

A couple of weeks ago we were asked to create a short video for the Kwame Brown campaign, and to do it in less than 2 weeks.  Ordinarily our animated videos take 5-7 weeks to complete but we’ve been wanting to get into politics and we decided we didn’t really need sleep all that much, so we took the job.  Two weeks of exhausting work later, we now have it done, but it’s only because we hired help.

Up until now, all of our videos have been completely us (Dave & Alex) from the illustration to the animation but in order to meet this very aggressive deadline, we hired a talented illustrator to help us out with the asset development.  Ben Jancewicz is a full-time designer for Brightline Interactive, an inspiring company out in Alexandria, VA.  Like all creative people, Ben does some freelance work and offered to help us out.  The results of this collaboration speak for themselves and I look forward to hiring lots of gifted illustrators to help us on future projects so if you do illustration or know someone who does, please reach out to us.

Here’s the video:

Kwame for Chair from The Duke & the Duck Productions on Vimeo.

Why You (Yes, You) Need a Video on Your Website

Here is the first of what will hopefully be a weekly series of short animations. Our idea was to create something quickly that had a clear message and simple visuals.  Animated videos on your website will help tell your story better than almost anything else.  If you’re looking for help getting started, please reach out.

An April resolution: Produce more!

As a new company, it’s sometimes difficult to step back from the Herculean task of filling up the sales funnel.  In fact, it’s easy to forget that we got into this business to create animations, and that shouldn’t change even if client work is slower than we’d like.  With that in mind, we are going to commit to a simple resolution: produce more animations!

Here is the first of what will hopefully be a weekly series of short animations: “Why you (yes, you) need a video on your website”.  If you have any suggestions for what else we should do, please leave a comment on the Vimeo page or email us at mail@dukeduck.com.

New Project: U.O.Me. Game

The U O Me game is precisely what you think would happen if you combined our zany brand of animation with the ideas of a couple of economic policy geeks.  Coming May 2010 (hopefully!) this will be a fun flash game aimed at educating the millennial generation about the national debt.  The producers of U O Me are some friends of mine that I met through Coffee Break DC and initial funding came from Mobilize.org.  We’ve been asked to do all the creative assets and animation for the game, as well as an animated trailer to help with fundraising. Find out more on Facebook and Twitter.

While development is still in the earliest of stages, I wanted to share some of the initial concept art here.  This scene will serve as the primary choice menu, with more options exposing themselves when the player clicks on the buildings.