Continuing on our focus on fmovie franchises for the month of October, THIS time we focus on the king of them all: STAR WARS! This was a genre defining series, not only for movies but for space opera, “SciFi”, and science fantasy on all media! The original trilogy was quite a milestone. Predictably further installments weren't quite as well received but it still remains popular even so! Currently it's having a resurgence in popularity once more. We on the Quackcast LOVE Star Wars because it's a ...
Oct 15, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 448
For the month of October we've decided to look at a different movie franchise each week, starting with Indiana Jones! Banes and Tantz have way more knowledge about the films than I, having watched them much more, but we all have a fondness for the character. Who is Indiana Jones? He's a 1930s style pulp fiction adventure hero archaeologist. Based on a mixture of things, from the hoax Grand Canyon adventurer G.E. Kinkaid to the characters of Edgar Rice Burroughs, you can even see a bit of Herge's...
Oct 08, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 447
Today we're getting all META and interviewing the creator of another webcomics podcast! Jamais Jochim is the host of Webcomics Reviews and Interviews! It's a podcast that covers much the same ground as we do, but with more research and less winging it, also more interviews with experts and webcomicers, so he's really worth checking out. Our $5 and up patrons can see video of us chatting with him in the flesh! This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Breached: Sounding like a mix of taiko d...
Oct 01, 2019•56 min•Season 1Ep. 446
Copyright is a complicated thing and something that all creators should have a little bit of a working understanding off! Checkout my newspost lined bellow for more info! you need to know this stuff. I must apologise… I hadn't had much sleep and it was very late so I occasionally drift off into nonsense during the Quackcast. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Dragons in Civilized Lands: Compelling, foreboding, panoramic, an epic landscape is slowly revealed bellow as you swoop on dow...
Sep 24, 2019•39 min•Season 1Ep. 445
Endings… getting them right is SO very hard. We've chatted about this before but this time Tantz has a number of good methods to make them happen right! What are some of YOUR fave endings? This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Wild Wolves: The desolation of the wolf howl is emphasised by the cold darkness of the strings as they moan in unison, bleeding bleakness and shadow into the world, and yet there are hints of light sparkling within… Topics and shownotes Tantz's newspost, Sticking ...
Sep 17, 2019•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 444
Based on Banes' newspost about the latest Dave Chappelle comedy special, this Quackcast talks about the way audience reception to it has been somewhat divided based on the topics covered verses current prevailing attitudes and the so-called “outrage culture” We broaden things a bit to talk about the so-called PC culture and what it really means: ie There are many people who's main motivation is to work positively to make sure others are included and supported, especially people who were traditio...
Sep 10, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 443
How about having it so anyone in your story can die? Let me explain: It's fake. NOT just anyone can die OK? Your main character will still survive until the end and all that, but what you do is set things up so it really truly looks like they're vulnerable and can die, this way it gives the story bigger stakes. If all the other characters are obvious redshirts then who cares? You KNOW the main character or characters will make it to the end so the threat of death or even injury isn't that import...
Sep 03, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 442
Cooperation Vs Competition. For decades the mantra was competition is good: it produces progress and makes things better… Well that's actually false. Competition is what you're forced into as a response to limited resources, so you do what you have to to win, which mainly involves losing everything that doesn't serve that specific objective. Competition is massively harmful to progress in general, it ONLY helps you excel in one small area to massive cost. Think of it in terms of an Olympic sprin...
Aug 27, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 441
Today we compare and contrast two ways of making characters: starting with a pure archetype and building it with tropes, or creating a character organically through circumstance and interaction with other characters. Quackcast 440 has the full crew of Ozoneocean, Banes, Pitface and Tantz! Our description of the two types of characterisation are are probably artificial extremes but it helps to see the advantages and disadvantages of both. Some advantages to starting with archetypes and building t...
Aug 20, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 440
Tantz's clever idea was that the weather isn't just a backdrop… it's an important prop in it's own right. Weather can be used to drive a plot: the wind snatches a hat and makes a person chase it, which causes them to meet another character. It can be an antagonist: people fighting a storm for example or running form a tornado. It can signal and enhance emotions: rain for a sad funeral or sun for happy for a happy event. Growing shadows can signal an ominous turn of events, wind billowing out a c...
Aug 13, 2019•59 min•Season 1Ep. 439
Sometimes your audience just doesn't pick up on the clever symbolism, the hints, the metaphor, the underlying themes and all the artistic cleverness in writing and art that you've filled your work up with! So what do you do when that happens? Do you call them philistines and rage-quit, do you double down and make your work even more confusingly impenetrable till they're FORCED to decipher your genius, do you accept the state of affairs and dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, or do...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 438
Today we cover the interesting trope of the “old warrior”. This was based upon a newspost Banes came up with last week. He was thinking of Captain Picard in the latest Star Trek series and he also brought up Luke Skywalker from the latest Star Wars movie. The “Old Warrior” makes a really cool protagonist, in this Quackcast we try and discover why that is… Well we came up with a few insights! -First up, the “old warrior” is often a side character in the secondary role of a mentor, i.e. someone th...
Jul 30, 2019•53 min•Season 1Ep. 437
To become truly successful at one thing you need to focus on that alone. Is it worth it? There are MANY calls on our time with all the side things we like to do, ESPECIALLY webcomics. One of the few ways to become a really successful superstar at any one thing is to start dropping all the other things that call on your time and devote all your energy to that one thing! Then you can push past all limitations and devote the effort and time needed to properly succeed. But the real question you have...
Jul 23, 2019•53 min•Season 1Ep. 436
We're discussing spin-offs in this one. Why do them? There are many very different reasons for doing a spin-off as opposed to a sequel, prequel or a totally new story: - Spin-offs make promotion and marketing of the work easier because it has an existing audience who are invested in its world. - It gives you as a creator more freedom because you're not as strongly constrained by the existing cannon of the parent stories, unlike sequels etc. and you don't have to do any new world building! - For ...
Jul 16, 2019•56 min•Season 1Ep. 435
This time we're chatting about settings and where your characters exist in space… where does all the action happen in your comics and WHY does it happen there? Bane's had the really novel idea of thinking of story settings as action playsets, which are toy settings made based on a TV show or movie where you can play with action figures and act out key moments FROM the TV show or movie: Unlike a dollhouse they only have the key sets where the important things happen. This is a magnificently cleve...
Jul 09, 2019•51 min•Season 1Ep. 434
Today we chat about a furore on Twitter focussing on a artist who made a tutorial about the differences between the line work of beginners and advanced artists. Many people identified their art style with the work described as “beginner” and took extreme offence at that characterisation. It's the contention of Tantz that “beginner” is not a dirty word. We're all beginners at something. We can all stand to learn things. I don't necessarily agree that sketchy lines in art are the sign of a beginne...
Jul 02, 2019•59 min•Season 1Ep. 433
Just Banes and I for this one! Today we have 3 topics: 1. Being positive and how that really helps us in online communication and social networking, as well as giving a boost to those we talk to- very important in comic communities. 2. How to get more eyes looking at your work. We always need to build our audiences! 3. Updates for drunk duck to modernise the site… We're going to have to raise a lot of money for this! How is the best way? -1. There's an old myth that “being positive” helps you ge...
Jun 25, 2019•48 min•Season 1Ep. 432
*Cover-art from the movie poster for METROPOLIS, not Atlas shrugged :) This Quackcast is about having political agendas in your work and expressing them well! We're talking about deliberately putting in ideas that you want to get across to people, NOT the idea that all work has agendas and ideas no matter what. That's not relevant to this discussion. When you want to want to get your ideas across there are good ways to do it and poor ways. When you do it poorly your work either has the opposite ...
Jun 18, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 431
At the beginning of a story how do you grab and KEEP your readers? This comes from the Friday newspost by Emma Clare. Her advice was pretty brilliant. From my own perspective it's generally characters that grab me first before anything else. Great art and a fantastic cover can hook your eyes, but without a great story or interesting characters there's zero to keep you there. Info dumps explaining the entire premise can scare people away but so can dumping the reader in a complex world and comple...
Jun 11, 2019•57 min•Season 1Ep. 430
This Quackcast was inspired by the fan reaction to Game of Thrones, a series that I haven't watched but Tantz and Banes have! Specifically it's about poorly written endings and gas-lighting fans rather than admitting to faults. No matter how great we are at writing (and the GOT guys MUST be good to have created such a popular show), that's no proof against writing a poor ending. Endings are the HARDEST things to do well, it's devilishly easy to flub them. Most fans of the GOT series seem disappo...
Jun 04, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 429
What are the different expectations for female and male audiences? This almost entirely a culture based thing, it changes depending on where and WHEN you are from as well as your age and experience… but some obvious things are determined by our physiology: sex sells, but there are slight differences based on gender. I wasn't interested in the “why” (genetic predeterminisim or evolutionary psychology), just the “what” In my experience and from my own perspective male audiences like a little more ...
May 28, 2019•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 428
Betrayal is an interesting thing to use in fiction. You can have betrayal of your nation, your organisation, friends, lovers, religion, beliefs, self. In stories it can be used to add a nasty twist or completely change the flow of events and alter the balance of power in a dramatic way! It can be devastating in relationships. The story of Judas betraying Christ for 30 pieces of silver is one of the most famous betrayal stories and became so iconic that the phrase “30 pieces of silver” or just th...
May 21, 2019•53 min•Season 1Ep. 427
Inspired by Emma Clare's Friday newspost about supporting characters, today we're discussing sidekicks! Sidekicks are a useful character type that are used in so many different ways. They can be a specialised type of supporting character that are also a main character or they can be the main protagonist in some cases. In comics sidekicks came in during the early days as a way of giving juvenile readers their own insert character who they could identify with… Bucky Barnes, Jimmy Olsen, Robin etc....
May 14, 2019•57 min•Season 1Ep. 426
In this Quackcast we chat about set-ups. pay-offs, and rip-offs. To make your climaxes and endings more satisfying you have pay-offs for audience expectations: set them up in the story and pay them off at the end. If you fail to pay-off then you get a rip-off, it's pretty simple. Your audience will be really disappointed. That's not to say disappointing and unsatisfying ends to stories are wrong, not at all! Often those are fully intended. We're just talking about satisfying audiences, not “good...
May 07, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 425
On one side we have creators of content and on the other we have the consumers. The consumers number in their billions and they're voraciously hungry for constant stimulation! Pretty much all creators are consumers too… So why don't they want the beautifully made, clever, spicy, artisanal dish you're selling? Why do they prefer the nice, bland, familiar mass-market high in fat, sugar and salt fast-food of the mainstream instead? One approach people typically take is just to ape the mainstream an...
Apr 30, 2019•42 min•Season 1Ep. 424
What's your favourite weapon in fiction? Mine are ridiculously giant swords, huge anti-tank rifles, and mecha. There are a lot of complex reasons for weapon choices in fiction, a Kalashnikov assault rifles for example signals certain things about the person carrying it: They're usually a bad guy for a start. This originated during the cold war, with certain types of bad guys using AKs. First it was Soviet Bloc soldiers, then it was Viet Con and rebels from South East Asia, then it became the “te...
Apr 23, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 423
The entire gang comes together today for two topics that were taken from recent newsposts: Emma Clare's Positive self promotion, and Tantz Aerine's Handling Controversial Characters. First up we chat about why it's always a great idea to sell yourself positively, NOT be arrogant or douchey, but rather by talking enthusiastically about what you genuinely love about your work and using that REAL and SINCERE enthusiasm to infect others with your love of what you do. Emma was mainly talking about th...
Apr 16, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 422
Today we're talking about all the ways nightmares can be used in stories. This is based on a newspost by our very own dreamboat Tantz Aerine. Nightmares are great for foreshadowing through premonitions, forcing characters to confront things and change their minds, ratcheting up tension in a story and all sorts of other useful things that you'd never consider. You can use symbolism and heightened reality, surrealism, fantasy and lots of experimental techniques that you couldn't do in your normal ...
Apr 09, 2019•56 min•Season 1Ep. 421
The entire gang is here this time again. This marks number 420 of the Quackcasts we've done. 420 is code among some for smoking dope, so going with that theme we're talking about the influence of substances on creative endeavours. People try and use substances to facilitate their creativity, we chat about why they do it, how it works, why it fails, the benefits and the issues. We DO NOT advocate taking illegal things in any way at all. This includes ANY substance, from dope, to coffee, to redbul...
Apr 02, 2019•55 min•Season 1Ep. 420
It's the rating game! Yeah! This Quackcast was inspired by Emma Clare's newspost on Friday about rating levels. On Drunk Duck we have 4 rating levels so they're nice and simple: “E” for everyone, “T+” for teens, “M” for mature, and “A” for Adult! We talk about why ratings exist and how to use them. But why do ratings exist? Well it's complicated actually… The main reason is that all cultures have various taboos and things they consider inappropriate to be viewed in certain situations so most cou...
Mar 26, 2019•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 419
