There are a lot of sync problems and I don't know why exactly. I will say everything had been timed perfectly when I did the bulk of the movie on my crappy computer at home but when I brought it into school it ran twice as fast as it was supposed to while set to the same frame rate. I played with it a bit, but still it seems like the actual sync of it changes every time and with every computer so everyone will just have to deal with it.

"OF DUCKS AND NOT-DUCKS" is the culmination of a number of things, initially meant to mean nothing at all but forced to mean more than I wanted it to.

It's complete silliness and it becomes sillier through the ridiculous attempted serious reading by Mr. Erik Villanueva (unfortunately his first name is spelled wrong in the credits). He did about six different readings, all of them hilarious, but this is the one I decided on because of the weird effects he added.

The "not-duck" started as a desperate sketch I did my freshman year in high school and I can't remember what caused it. I revisited the concept when feeling an overwhelming amount of stress a few years later in part because of an expectation to produce quality (and realistic) artwork for my nomination to Governor's School of the Arts but for other reasons as well. From there on the nameless character became a form of self-portrait and I got so annoyed when people said it looked like a duck that I named a painting of it "THIS IS NOT A DUCK". I've since written a poem about the character which was published in my high school's literary magazine; the "not-duck" actually represents things about myself that are very private and not particularly funny at all. In part I did this in an attempt to allow myself to laugh about those things.

The "duck" as presented here is Mr. Kyle Arlington who was my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Although there was seemingly no rationale behind it I found myself referring to him as "Arling-duck" with Veronica Fischer. Whether or not subconsciously there was a real reason I was referring to him as the "duck" while having a "not-duck" character as myself, I really don't know--I doubt it--but when the realization hit me that there was a duck and a not-duck late one night I wrote out a long comparison trying to determine what made someone a duck or a not-duck.

In short, a "duck" is someone who feels confident with who they are. They have a distinct sense of identity and are generally not too self-conscious. I don't know if Mr. Arlington is necessarily the epitome of this concept but he became it for the sake of this project. I guess he is in some ways, but everyone has a bit of a "not-duck" in them. "Not-ducks" are people who are not comfortable in their own skin and feel unable to communicate properly. Mr. Arlington gave me the OK to make fun of him in this movie and even allowed me to put it on-line, despite his not-duck-like self-consciousness about people seeing it. But I don't know if he ever really understood that, despite the jokes I might be making about him here, I'm presenting him as what people should strive to be and if I'm the "not-duck" I'm the one who's being lampooned.