We’re going to SXSW!
Movin’ on up (to real offices)
Alex is Speaking at Ignite DC Tomorrow Night
Tomorrow night I will be one of 16 “artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities” to answer the Ignite DC challenge: Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say? As it happens, this is what I’m planning on saying:
“How We Thought It Would Happen: Prescient visions of the future from the Victorian past
“People have always been fascinated by the future, but it wasn’t until the industrial boom of the Victorian era that our anticipation of progress was met with the kind of exponential growth that we now take for granted. This talk will focus on what late 19th-century thinkers saw in their crystal balls and how, in a lot of cases, they were’t too far off the mark. You will be amazed at how some technologies were anticipated and what others were way off the mark: Video conferencing, television, telephones, the internet, and of course, zeppelins.”
Introducing David Hurley, our first intern
Wow. First we move into a (somewhat) real office and now we’ve hired our first intern! This company is clearly going places. David is an advertising student at the Art Institute of Washington and has truly impressive drawing and digital painting skills. We’re looking forward to his storyboarding/illustration help and hopefully we’ll be able to teach him a thing or two about animation in the process.
Moving into a new office
There comes a time in every company’s history when working from a laptop on the kitchen table is no longer the best way to do business, and I’m excited to say that day has come for The Duke & the Duck. Taking advantage of Dave’s move to DC, we thought it would make sense to turn one of the bedrooms of our townhouse into a dedicated workspace and I must say that so far, so good.
Here are some pictures:
There’s a big empty wall across from the desks that we’ve been thinking about turning into a giant white board, or maybe an area for our contractor folks to come in and work, but we’ll have to see how that goes. I for one would like to put up a giant (8 ft. tall) Duke & the Duck logo.
Working with a new illustrator. We’re in love!
A few weeks ago, we wrote about how we were asked to do some work for The World Bank and yesterday we wrapped up production on a series of 4 animated videos. It was a really exciting project and we are proud of how the videos turned out, but I think the thing we are most excited about as a company is the relationship that has developed with the illustrator we hired for the project, Kiril Tchangov. We’ve talked about the importance of illustration talent before, but with these videos it’s pretty obvious how much of a difference it can make. We can’t share the videos yet (Bank policy) but for now, take a look at some of these stills from the series:
TV showing 1/10 people as policemen
Two people communicating in a market setting
The impacts of development on a landscape
Earth shown with windmills, trees and solar panels
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.