What is the film about?

A man feeds some birds… the birds get nasty.

What influenced it?

In terms of writing, an obvious influence is South Park and their brand of repulsive humour. A less obvious influence is Monty Python. The endless repetition of the bird’s dialogue in our animation is definitely taken from the absurdity of Monty Python and their use of wordplay.

In terms of animation, the goal was to juxtapose the aggressive, foul language of the dialogue with some beautiful frame-by-frame animation. The old style Looney Tunes cartoons were a big influence especially in regards to the exaggerated movements and reactions of the characters. The black and white colour palette were party inspired by films such as Sin City and comic books like Persepolis.

A little background information...

Fuck Slug is a two-man writer/animator production company. We’ve worked together on multiple projects throughout the years but lost contact for a couple of years. Finally when meeting up and grumbling about our jobs, we decided to create Fuck Slug!

Fuck Slug came out of our reaction of previously trying to make marketable products for the internet and getting nowhere. People simply weren’t interested, no matter how many marketing techniques we tried. Finally, we decided to literally say “fuck you” to everyone and create bizarre and absurd cartoons that make us laugh. Turns out, people quite like it when you say “fuck you!” to them, especially when the animation looks cool too.

Birds was our first attempt at making an animation over a minute long and creating a narrative arc (as vague as it may seem, it is there!).

How was the film made?

Writing was completed over 2 days and amended as we went.
Voice recording took place when we snuck into a recording studio at the weekend.
Animation was completed using Adobe Animate, a real pain in the ass sometimes.
Backgrounds were completed by an external source by the cool name of Mono.
Editing was used in order to get comic timing with Adobe Premier Pro.
Final effects etc. were completed with Adobe After Effects.