May 23, 2014

Joanna Davidovich premieres "Monkey Rag" online

Joanna Davidovich is a freelance animator based in Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, she has worked as an animator, designer, and storyboard artist since 2005 on commercials, on-air content, and TV shows. [Her animated short "Monkey Rag," which premiered online this afternoon, has been making the festival circuit since its completion last July. Last weekend, it won second place in the Independent Film category at the 45th ASIFA-EAST Animation Awards.

The film is a two-part short film and music video, hilariously animated to the song of the same name by the now-defunct folk band Asylum Street Spankers. Although Davidovich animates with digital programs in her day job, "Monkey Rag" was entirely hand-drawn on paper and composited using Toon Boom Animate Pro. Here are her original pencil tests:

"I knew I wanted to make a short film, but of all the ideas I had, this was the most specific," Davidovich tells Cartoon Brew.

"So I made a really rough board-o-matic and sent it to the band and said, 'There's a good chance this won't make any money, so I'm just going to put it out there at festivals and online.'

The project, which Davidovich worked on between freelance jobs, at night, and on weekends, took four years to complete. He said, "Sometimes I didn't think it would ever be finished because I didn't think ahead--you want to make a full animation that's almost four minutes long, right? But I never thought about that," he said. Given that the animation compositing software was not designed for works on paper, how the finished film would be imported into the computer for compositing was also not a consideration at the outset.

With the help of Nate Foster, who did the visual effects compositing for the film, she began looking for a solution. First she tried Flipbook Pro, which did not work, and finally settled on a mix of Toon Boom Animate Pro and After Effects. When the optical registration and batch scanner features did not meet her expectations and she was stuck with customer service, she heard that a Toon Boom representative was offering a workshop at a local studio.

"We invited the guy over with a bottle of scotch and he sat down and explained the whole program to us. Not everything we needed to fix was fixed, but he explained what the program could not do. We knew we had to find a workaround." Once she found a solution that was closest to their requirements, she was able to begin sending files to Darren Tate, a London-based animator who had volunteered to help color the film. The final film was composited in After Effects, as described in this multi-part tutorial.

Although she is happy with the final product, Davidovich is looking for a production system that she can use for post-production on future projects. She asserts, "I have a huge list of animations I want to make before I die." When it comes to actual animation, however, she is sticking to hand-drawing for the time being. If you erase something, it doesn't disappear completely, and if you adjust things like layer opacity, you can still see the initial idea." [Digital] is better than ever. I downloaded some really great custom brushes, which made painting even more fun.