Mr Duck
FedUP Studio Lab
Creative Director / Illustrator
Sara Mutande
Production / 2D Animation
Federico (Fred) Parodi
Soundtrack
Ascari
Overview
Mr. Duck is sad because his home has been destroyed. One day, he finds a seed that generated new life, bringing different creatures closer together.
SOFTWARE: Photoshop, After Effects
Brief
Illustration
Sara Mutande is a Spanish artist who works between Barcelona, ES and New Zealand. She works as an art director, illustrator and designer.
With a degree in Fine Arts, she is a multidisciplinary artist, working in visual communication from picture books, branding, murals to animation.
Her passion is the world of botany where she explores the natural shapes and colours and brings them into her particular world, full of humour, naïve optimism and weird and friendly characters.
Sara produced a series of beautiful illustrations, prepped and layered for animation. Once all the illustrated frames were ready, we started the process of animating them.
Animation
The illustrations were animated combining cut-out and traditional frame by frame hand-drawn techniques.
I rigged Mr Duck adding a virtual skeleton to his body structure to make him move, and we achieved head rotation with traditional hand-drawn animation. Animation boiling helped blending the two techniques. A line boil is a visible effect that occurs when frames of an animation don’t align perfectly. It gives the animation almost a “bubbly” quality, hence the term “boil.” It’s a common occurrence with hand-drawn or painted animations.
Camera moves and parallax were also added in post-production with the help of After Effects 3D cameras.
Music
Ascari is a queer non-binary artist from Italy: composer, pianist, singer and sound designer.
They have a Master Degree in Film Music Composition from Italy and have worked worldwide as a freelance soundtrack composer for film, advertising and videogames. Their composition language mixes classical and electronic music with cinematic minimalism.