To many “animated documentary” sounds like an oxymoron: the genre inherently refuses indexical understandings of “the real” as purported, and highly debated, within photographic documentary practices. Similarly, it is accepted that historical, archival, or found footage imagery may stand in…
In 2015, Griffith Film School’s LiveLab collaborated with Gold Coast Health and Sentis to produce an animated short on autism. Released online in 2016, Ky’s Story – Living with Autism aims to raise awareness about autism through the story of Ky…
Spain is suffering from a crisis of memory and, although there is little consensus as to whether this crisis is one of too much remembrance or too little, what cannot be avoided is the prevalence of the topic in screen…
Producing animation for a live action documentary involves many practical and logistical challenges. Put plainly, live action documentary filmmakers don’t always understand how animation works, and vice versa, and the production methods are vastly different. In this post I will…
I’m currently pondering the idea of animated ‘interjections’ in otherwise live action documentaries. I first started thinking about animated interjections a long time ago, probably when I was doing my PhD research around 2008, but definitely when I was working…
Animation can represent change, even when this is invisible. Moreover, even deprived of the dimension of time, animation can recreate/represent variance and difference. Difference and variance is at the crux of the creation of animation’s illusion. Norman McLaren (in Sifianos…
When we listen to music there comes a distinct experience of the passing of time. As the music changes, develops and grows, certain ‘events’ in the sound mark out a subjective feeling of time. Our awareness of following this passage…
It can be argued that the primary emphasis of the animation process is on observation of movement. As animators, we are continually studying motion in order to understand the way things naturally move and interact. Motion can be considered the…
“The delight of animation comes of the experience of movement, and the art of animation is, above all, that of movement”, writes Thomas Lamarre (2013: 117). At the heart of our contemporary cinematographic understanding of animation are older meanings of…
If, as I believe, Art is a never ending search for the elusive real, there are many ways to go about that infinite task and, short of using a stick and making marks in the wet sand, using one’s fingers…
