Interview with ‘All Hands on Duck’ Director Sam Shaw

16 December 2020 // Interviews

Laura-Beth Cowley

Features Writer

In for a duck-filled treat this Christmas? From the lovely folks over at Bristol-based animation studio Sun and Moon and the bizarre mind of director Sam Shaw, comes this delectable new short about three buccaneer water fowls as they help out a fellow bird in need on the most festive of occasions, but are there intentions honourable? You’ll have to watch to find out. Full of comedic visuals and hilarious timing, All Hands on Duck: Christmas Dinner showcases a great line-up of likeable, goofy characters getting up to no good in the classic tradition of the animated Christmas special. We took the opportunity to have a little pre-seasonal ramble with Sam about his newest animated offering.

If I’m not mistaken, you’ve been working on this idea and these characters for a while – where did the idea come from?

The premise actually started as a little zine me and my tiny little brother came up with, back in Cambridge. We’ve got a really nice relationship, he’s a super creative dude. We just wanted a little project and we’ve both grown up with a house just chock full of ducks – you can’t move for ducks, we had so many – and we both like pirates. So we were just throwing duck puns at each other and drawing them. We made this little 20 page zine that we sold on Etsy as a get-rich-quick scheme; we just about made printing costs back. But after that died down I thought the premise was good enough to develop. I made a kind of series pitch by myself just to practice writing and world building and then, because I quite liked it, I gave it to Sun and Moon and just asked “Is this anything?” Sun and Moon were absolutely lovely and super supportive of it, they just ran with it.

Original Zine created by Sam and his brother

We started to develop the world and the characters by gathering in the writers rooms.  Then, out of the blue, one day they said “We’re going to take you off paid work, we’ve got a bit of money in the pot and we just want you to direct and develop a Christmas short film”. It was really nice to be supported in that way. From there we created a proper writers’ room and a Slack page for it so we could jot down our ideas. We got a few animators on it, including Erinn Lucas and Dan Keeble. We developed the animation style and that was it. It was just sort of like this tiny snowball that kept rolling and rolling and rolling, with everyone’s support, and now it’s like this massive snowman, which is cool.

Why were there so many ducks in your house?

We actually lived in a little council house, but we had like a relatively big garden. I was brought up vegetarian in the countryside, so me and my mum and my sister used to go to farmers’ auctions which basically sell animals for meat. There were always loads of turkeys, chicken, ducks and geese in little cages. So my mom used to go around feeding them water, because it always seemed to be a hot summer’s day, and they’re in tiny cages. And after a while my mom just started buying ducks. A lot of them were really injured because they would get pecked to high heaven from opposing cages. So we’d nurse them back to health and then just let them run around in the garden in the house as they pleased.

All Hands on Duck (Sun & Moon)

So the story that’s actually in the episode, where did that come from?

So not only did I grow up with a bunch of ducks but I grew up with a turkey that we called Bernard – who turned out to be a lady turkey in the end, but the name stuck. But  because I grew up with loads of ducks and turkeys, we never ate any birds growing up. So that was sort of the seed that grew into the story tree. Which was then developed in the writers room adding bits like this would be funny, this would be funny and it just became a montage sketch show of what we wanted to see. I think it was Louis (Jones, Sun & Moon co-founder) who came up with the idea to massage the turkey with butter, which is like my favourite bit , and the ending has – no spoilers – but the reindeer is also autobiographical because I’m a massive hypocrite as I’ve eaten reindeer at a Christmas party before. So that’s that’s basically how it came together, autobiography at the start, funny stuff in the middle, autobiographical to end.

Could you talk a little bit more about the individual characters?

They came straight from the zine and it was just a matter of picking the drawings I liked the most or the puns I liked best. So, Quacktain, he’s the main dude. He’s kind of morally ambiguous and I really like that. I kind of wanted this to feel like Always Sunny in Philadelphia for kids, where you don’t necessarily root for a character, but you just want to watch what happens to them. Shoveler, I think she must be my favourite character at this point. Because a shoveler is a type of duck and that’s as far as the joke goes, that there’s a duck called a shoveler and she holds a shovel every now and then. That’s it, but to create expressions with her face is my favourite and, looking at the bigger picture, there’s a trope for female-leaning characters where they’re always the sensible voice of reason. Which is fine, but I wanted to make her the funniest one and push her expressions and mannerisms to the extent you would any other character. So that was really fun. And Egg-Leg Pete. Yeah, he’s great. I wanted to draw someone who’s just been put through the wringer. He’s like, if someone’s ‘spilled’ a character. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say about Egg-Leg, he’s not a complicated fellow.

Can you tell me a little bit about working with Nice Sounds?

Yeah. Max from Nice Sounds is a bit of a mate at this point. We began working together through a job for the BBC teaching kids about music. He is super talented and it felt like a proper collaboration. It was a truly 50/50 split between the sound and the animation. I really liked that way of working, that sound is another character that keeps the thing plodding along. It’s definitely got a voice of its own. We stayed in contact, we’ve wanted to collaborate on a bunch of different stuff so it was a bit of a dream come true. I sort of pounced on him out of the blue because I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted to work with and he offered his services. Working with him on a more professional level felt like a wonderful collaboration, I don’t know many people who can take a pirate theme, duck theme, Christmas theme score and make it work. He even voiced all the ducks, even the singing. I would never let anyone see it without his sound. But I had to work the scratch sound I did and he’s just made it like 400% better.

 

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Can you tell me a little bit about the animation process on it? I am assuming it was Toon Boom?

Thank you for assuming it was Toom Boom! It was meant to be in Toon Boom, but seeing how much we had to do and how much time we had to do it, we had to sort of run to Flash which has its own problems. A lot of the humour for this short comes from, in my opinion, held expressions on characters, so I just needed to churn out as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible. And while Toon Boom helps you later on down the line, it takes a bit of time to set up every single character. This way I could just draw it, whack it into a scene and be done with it. So the process was doing a simple animatic made in Animate CC, getting an edited version from Louis, then building the character very quickly in Flash based on designs, building up a library of expressions, handshakes, arm shapes and leg shapes. The first few scenes, you hopefully don’t notice, but the artwork’s not quite as good, it gets better towards the end. I just had to work solely in a linear way and then build the characters, lay them out for the animators and do all the backgrounds as fast as I could in Photoshop. Then put a texture over everything to hide a few things. I didn’t have a chance to really put anything through After Effects, apart from I think some steam coming off the turkey’s jacuzzi. Animate CC, for all of its problems, is quite good for quickly putting something slightly polished together.

(Sun & Moon)

Is there a plan to do more with these characters? 

I would love to, there’s no plan. This is as far as we’ve got so far. There’s a pitch doc that we’re working on that looks pretty nice. We may send that to some networks at some point, using this as our animation test. Obviously, the dream would be to draw ducks forever, but I’m really happy and grateful to have got this far with it.

See more of the work of Sun & Moon at sunandmoonstudios.co.uk