Moo-Ack! Productions is a studio which creates animations & software. The studio is developed by Patrick W. Crawford a.k.a. TheDuckCow, and has made animated music videos reaching hundreds of millions, software used by hundreds of thousands, and tutorials + assets enabling people around the world to explore new skills. Some projects are solo delivered, others have brought together passionate teams.
You may know Patrick as…
The animator of one of those Minecraft music videos
Patrick was the lead animator and director for music videos such as “Destroy You” (produced for Phantaboulous), “Mr. Herobrine’s Singalong Tragedy” (self-produced), “Sometimes” (produced for Thinknoodles), and more. Patrick has long been an animator, and has worked in mediums ranging from stopmotion to 3D animation. Moo-Ack! Productions creates family-friendly content on many topics, and shares behind the scenes content to inspire excitement about the world of animation.
See more about animations here
A Blender 3D addon developer
Most know for MCprep, Patrick is also the programmer behind BlenderGuru’s Pro Lighting Studio addon, and is the maintainer of the CGCookie Addon Updater and Poliigon Material Converter projects. Additionally, he worked as a tools developed for Theory Studios for several years. Patrick is even credited on IMDb for visual effects work on the Emmy nominated tv show “Man in the High Castle” for mocap and render scripting work done for the show. Over the years, Patrick has open sourced many projects.
See more addon development here
A video course author on LinkedIn Learning and OpenCV.org
With courses on topics like scripting in blender and image processing with python, Patrick has always enjoyed teaching. In addition to those Lynda.com courses (now LinkedIn Learning), Patrick has additional tutorials and resources on this site and YouTube. More recently, Patrick co-narrated the acclaimed OpenCV for Beginners course. If you have interest in a particular topic, don’t hesitate to put in a request (contact here).
See more tutorials here
Some of Patrick’s original 3D renders
What does TheDuckCow say?
The original DuckCow logo, made in Gimp
Moo-Ack! of course. The original idea for the studio name came in late 2008. At the time, Patrick was joking with friends about different animal-morphs and their respective sounds. A duck-cow was one of the most memorable, given the the fitting noise it would make.
Fast-forward to 2009, Patrick was looking to start a new animation channel after having built up some experience making stopmotion animations. When looking for a unique studio name, TheDuckCow came to mind for being goofy and genuine, yet still a name that could garner respect and stand through time. Whether or not this is the case, the name has stuck ever since.
The original DuckCow logo (above) was created at the same time in 2009 with Patrick’s limited photo editing and design capabilities. From that original design, the logo has only undergone a couple revisions and remains the face of Moo-Ack! Productions across all platforms, while nabbing every vanity url possible in the process (youtube.com/TheDuckCow, twitter.com/TheDuckCow, instagram.com/TheDuckCow, fb.com/TheDuckCow, and so on).
Patrick is proud to have developed the brand of Moo-Ack! Productions and name TheDuckCow itself, where a simple google search or image search yields pages upon pages of content made since it all began.