FUTURE DUCK! Sent from a distant war torn FUTURE that’s like The TERMINATOR, but with DUCKS! Now, he lives in a HOUSE with a Whale, a T-Rex and an English Muffin, and they like, DO STUFF AND WHATEVER! YEAH!!
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Over the course of the last year-and-a-half, CopeandDalton (Paul Cope and Henry Dalton, both 29), two London-based online filmmakers with no budget, no training or background in animation, foolhardily locked themselves in a room with two macbooks and a gargantuan vat of coffee, and developed a unique animation style, mainly through optimistic ignorance – the result of which was ‘FUTURE DUCK!’, an eight-episode shortform online sitcom about a duck who comes from the future, who now lives with a semi-evolved Whale (who has little legs and likes wearing chinos), a thawed-out female T-Rex and a relentlessly chipper, sentient English Muffin.
Working 7 day weeks, day and night for over a year, Cope and Dalton did everything themselves on the show – from scripting, to creating the artwork, to writing and performing original songs, and recorded the episodes in their bedrooms with the help of a small cast of five actors (including Chris ‘Crabstickz’ Kendall).
Almost all episodes of FUTURE DUCK! spoof an aspect of social media and online life, be it memes and virals, spam emails, online dating, internet porn, Twitter, web ads, pop ups and more. CopeandDalton are relative newcomers to the world of online video – with no large existing following/fanbase to rely on, ‘Future Duck!’ is very much a labour of love, and a first foray into creating an original recurring series. Despite that, the show has already managed to attract tweets from, and made fans out of a number of UK celebrities – including ‘Top Gear’s James May, ‘Rude Tube’s Alex Zane, ‘Peep Show’s David Mitchell and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. As well as promoting episodes and interacting with followers through the CopeandDalton Twitter feed, they also layered several ‘easter eggs’ throughout the episodes, that when searched for would reveal in-character secret YouTube accounts, web pages and Twitter accounts, with more jokes and character stories to discover.
Credits
- Writers/Directors/Producers/Animators – Henry Dalton and Paul Cope
- Voice: Future Duck – Sam Devereaux
- Voice: Whale, Various – Chris ‘Crabstickz’ Kendall
- Voice: Rex – Rachel Esposti
- Voice: Muffin – Kate Somerset How
- Voice: David Attenborough, Tim Berners-Lee, Various – Terry Alderton
- Original Music: Henry Dalton, Alex Cornish, Chris George
Find Out More
http://futureduck.net
http://www.youtube.com/copeanddalton
http://www.facebook.com/copeanddalton
http://www.twitter.com/copeanddalton