Tomek Ducki  (1982, Budapest) is a Hungarian-Polish filmmaker and designer. Creator and director of multi-award winning animated shorts and music videos. He graduated from the Moholy-Nagy Unviersity of Art and Design in Budapest (MOME) and from the National Film and Television School in London. For ten years he mostly lives in Krakow and he tries to sleep more. 

If I am not mistaken, you have been involved into Polish and Hungarian animation since your childhood. How do these traditions influence your work?

It is difficult to tell, I think in Hungary I have learned more about storytelling and narrative techniques, whereas in Poland I was rather impacted by the visual approach and the construction of the atmosphere in the films.

You made all of your films in a different country, a different environment. What are the peculiarities?

I can almost say that my team is constant, so I don’t notice any differences in the production. Sometimes we work online, so it happens that I don’t meet the other people for years. When I am somewhere as a director, I ask them to come with me and join the production team. There were two designers who cooperated with me in the last years, and whose style determined the visual universe of the films: Gina Thorstensen from Norway and Weronika Banasinska from Poland.

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Your name is also related to lots of music videos and posters. What is that you most enjoy in the applied arts? How much freedom do you have here?

Lately I hardly ever undertake posters, unless they are related to animations. The task of a poster requires completely different mechanisms and it takes a while to my brain to switch. I obviously adore the music videos as a part of the animation work, but they usually are urgent jobs – in turn, I get complete freedom and the process is really inspiring. However, it happens that there is not even time for a short consultation before submitting the project. In the last months I had to refuse promising offers, because the deadline was surreally close and I already feel old for that.

Can you apply the creation process of the music videos in your own films? 

Of course, as one of the requirements in the case of the music videos is that they need to be one-of-a-kind, to have a unique visual universe, so we experiment a lot with diverse narrative or animation techniques. But there is never enough time to refine these works completely, so I compensate this in my own animation films. I always try to develop something from an earlier project and bring something new into it.

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One of your video clips is a paraphrase of Adam and Eve’s story, you also ask complex, almost unanswerable questions in Baths and Life Line. What does inspire you beside animation? 

The problems with no clear solution can usually keep my mind busy until the animation is ready. Beside this, my best inspiration is the deadline.

For example in Baths you mix several animation techniques in a very dynamic way. Is there any technique that attracts you recently and you would like to try it in a new work?

Indeed, now we are more or less in the middle of the production of my new short, we are working on different kinds of innovation and many elements of the music videos also appear. This is actually my first work made mostly under the camera’s lens, an analog animation, and it is quite difficult to describe it with words, but it really contains everything from mineral crystals to watercolour, chalks, wet rags, anything that fits a certain scene in dynamism and dramaturgy.