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  Automatic Duck, Inc. was founded by Harry Plate and Wes Plate, father and son respectively. Wes' background is as a creative editor, offlining regional and national commercials. Wes edited primarily on Avid Media Composers often in concert with Adobe After Effects. Harry has been a software engineer for many years (and has two Masters degrees), having worked for Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technology.
What is now Automatic Duck started in late 2000 as Wes had some ideas for how software could be employed to solve the tedious workflow issues plaguing today's digital artists. Harry's programming background made him the perfect choice for helping create Automatic Duck.
Today, in addition to Harry and Wes, Automatic Duck is Jessie Plate, Matt Esterly, Eric Yamada and Jay Boyer.
Why Automatic Duck?
In early 2001, as Wes and Harry were preparing to launch their new business and begin selling their first product, coming up with a company name became a real challenge. All kinds of very bad ideas were tossed around, until Harry suggested that the company needed a name that sounded cool but yet didn't mean anything. "Like Apple," Harry said.
Wes set out to find inspiration. While not a history buff, Wes was a fan of the Connections documentary series that was produced in the 1970s (this documentary series is fantastic, a real must-see) and as a fan Wes had the companion book on his shelf. While reading it one night, Wes came across a drawing of a robotic duck.
"Vaucanson's automated duck. It quacked, ate, drank, and excreted" the caption read. The two words automated duck stuck out to Wes as something sounding very cool indeed. Wes had read that passage around 10pm before going to bed. By midnight, unable to sleep because of Automated Duck going through his mind, Wes went online and researched more about the duck. It became apparent that the double-D sound in the middle of "Automated Duck" wasn't good, so Automatic Duck became the name of choice. By the time Wes went back to bed at 3am, he had mocked up a business card and puchased the automaticduck.com domain name.
The next morning, Wes said to Harry, "How about Automatic Duck?" Harry thought for a moment with a smile on his face, then replied "Yeah! I like it!". Thus history was born.
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