In 1955, Walt Disney Productions released A World Is Born, a 16mm short animated educational science film that visualized the natural history of Earth from the origins of cellular life to the extinction of the dinosaurs (see Figure 1). The…
Undeniably, the most popular way of intersecting animation and documentary is that of using animation to recount a factual occurrence. Yet, this is not the only possible manner in which they can combine. Another way of crossing them over consists in…
Featured in this interview is Tara Knight’s animated, episodic, documentary series of short films, Mikumentary, about the singing, dancing, and collaboratively-created hologram Hatsune Miku. Through fragmented storytelling and animation that responds to Miku as a reconfigurable subject, Knight creates a modular…
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…
