There Is A Moose directed by Robert Hicks

What did Robert Hicks say about his film?

“There Is A Moose” was born as a simple two-note musical chorus one afternoon when I was driving my car as a teenager. I can’t recall what triggered it, perhaps a passing billboard, who knows? But that catchy chorus stayed with me all these decades. I was producing my Christmas album in 2022, which I knew would take one year, and I wanted to create a single in the meantime. I thought “Moose” would be a fun, infectious ditty. I developed it into a full-length song with a complicated surf-rock orchestration which includes 13 key changes. Since the sound was fully produced, dropping in the images was a fun, freeing and stimulating process. I wanted high production values while maintaining a sense of spontaneity, freedom, and a degree of rawness. I felt it was very important to show the Moose in its natural habitat, so I licensed several clips of stock footage. I wanted it to look like a wildlife film, but something you might find on Sesame Street or The Electric Company, something that would delight both children and adults. The song is zany and exciting, so the images followed suit, sometimes embracing Absurdism. I play the part of the “narrator”. The vocals are essentially done in a rap style, and I have eleven costume changes. I hired an animator, Kelly Fry,to design 3 separate and distinct sequences. I knew exactly where the animation would go. Giving her as much freedom as possible, I explained exactly what I wanted in each section, and she got my vision perfectly. All the images gradually filled in, and I could see as I went along which segments to create from scratch, and which would utilize the stock footage. Working in this way I did not need to use a story board.