• Creating your own language: an interview with Sheila M. Sofian

    Sheila M. Sofian’s animated documentary films have played at festivals including Annecy, Ottawa, Hiroshima, and Zagreb among many others. Her work includes numerous short films as well as the hour-long animation/live action hybrid documentary ‘Truth Has Fallen’ (2013). She received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is currently a Professor at the University of Southern California where she has been teaching since 2006. We interviewed Sheila about her work, and changes she has observed in the field of animated documentary over the course of her career.

    CM: How did you first come to documentary filmmaking?

    SS: When I was at undergraduate school at Rhode Island School of design, the degree we had there was film, video, and animation. We were required to take both film classes and animation classes. So I took documentary as well as animation there, and I loved the documentary class. And then I made my senior film, ‘Mangia!’ which I didn’t consider to be a documentary at the time although now looking back on it I have mixed feelings about that. It’s about living with an Italian family so it’s based on my experiences.

    CM: It reminds me a little bit of John and Faith Hubley.

    SS: I was influenced by the Hubleys, as well as Caroline Leaf and other people. So I gravitated into it, but before I did my animation degree I was studying a lot of social science and that merged a lot of my interests – the social science, documentary, and animation. And I just followed a direction that felt natural. It wasn’t really a thing at that time, so it wasn’t until later that I started hearing the words ‘documentary animation’ and that was kind of exciting because you could see that was becoming more of a reality all round the world.

    CM: At that time was the work primarily considered documentary or animation? 

    SS: At that time it was just “animation”. There were a couple of other people that worked in non-fiction animation and we always felt kind of like second class citizens at the animation festivals because they were more interested in, you know, the craft of animation, squash and stretch, whether it looked beautiful, whereas we were concerned about content. So my films were actually performing better in regular film festivals and not in animation festivals specifically. But then over time that’s changed, there’s been more specific categories for animated documentary, and it’s been elevated a little bit more in status.

    CM: And in terms of techniques that you were using, were they driven by the subject matter or driven by commissioning requirements, or other factors? 

    SS: I like to think it was driven my the subject matter because I think that especially when you’re dealing with memories, painting on glass works really effectively. And also for my film ‘Truth has Fallen’ – where I worked with both live action and animation – I felt that painting on glass could carry the weight of the live action more. If I cut back and forth to drawn, it would have been too dramatic of a switch. So that was one of my reasons for choosing painting on glass for that film, I felt that I could match the tone better. 

    Truth Has Fallen (Sheila M. Sofian, 2013)
    Truth Has Fallen (Sheila M. Sofian, 2013)

    CM: Was ‘Truth has Fallen’ difficult to get made?

    SS: It took me a long time, it was hard to get funding, but in some ways it was good that I didn’t get as much funding as I had originally wanted. I was planning on doing more live action and I think it forced me to do more animation, which worked better in the long run. The live action was a big hurdle for me because I hadn’t worked in that way, so I had to work with a big crew of people and all the logistics that go along with that. I really wanted to push it to look more like the animation and I think I would have worked harder to do that, if I were to do it again. It was a learning experience, I learned a great deal. 

    CM: So actually to design the live action sequences to mimic the animation?

    SS: Yes, I was trying to approach it in the same way as I approached the animation, and I was thinking of the people being more like puppets. I worked with a lot of extras and of course they wanted to be more dramatic, and act, and I was trying to control them. Animators are controlling, you know, we like to control the whole world that we’re working in. You can play God and you don’t have to worry about anything else in the frame, you can make all those decisions yourself – but with live action there are things out of your control.

    CM: One of the things I find interesting in animated documentary is the tension between the dynamic spontaneity that can come with documentary, set against the tight control that an animator wants, and how that balance happens. Did you find any challenges around working with a live action crew? 

    SS: I was working with a professional crew of about twenty people, and I had three locations: I had the stages at USC, I had an abandoned prison, and I had a courthouse in Orange County. So there were all the logistics in terms of licensing, generators, security, catering… I had a good team of people I worked with, I had a great production manager who had a lot of experience, I had a DP that I met at a film festival and he helped me get a lot of the crew like gaffers and all that. What was great about him was that even though I was inexperienced, he would pull me aside, away from the crew and tell me how to approach things differently that I wasn’t aware of, or the etiquette on the film set. What was interesting about that film shoot was that the crew were so used to working on these horrible movies, b-movies, and they were really excited about working on something that had meaning. They weren’t used to artsy films so they would say things like “oh the artsy shots”, but then they started getting into it and making suggestions, so they were getting more and more invested in the film as time went on. So it was really a fun experience, it was a large group of people, but it was good. But I kind of prefer the solitary working alone by myself in animation, rather than having all of these variables and all of this organisation and so much to worry about with live action. 

    CM: And then you’re also working with interviewees? 

    SS: Yes that was a whole other ballgame. I got a Guggeheim Fellowship which allowed me to travel with a producer who opened doors for me, I got some good names to interview because of her, as well as my main subject for the film, who introduced me to his clients so I could interview them. We travelled all over the United States interviewing different people, and that was really fruitful. 

    CM: How was the film distributed?

    SS: It’s hard because distributing a feature length – featurette, 1-hour film – is different from shorts. I worked through an agent and he got it on Los Angeles public library system and other public libraries around the United States where you can stream it for free, and also it’s on Amazon, as a DVD. 

    CM: What was the budget?

    SS: The production was more than ten years, and from the inception it was more like sixteen, from the first interview that I did. And the budget was about $100k,  but that doesn’t really include all of my time. I did approximately 20,000 paintings, all the animation was just me, I didn’t have anybody else help with that. But most of the money went directly to paying other people. 

    CM: In your work there are often political and ethical themes. Is that inherent in your work and who you are as a filmmaker, or has that come through the commissioning opportunities that there are about? 

    SS: None of them have come through commissioning, it’s all been work that I’m drawn towards. What excites me the most are human rights oriented films – I’m interested in making something about immigration, or a personal story. I’m really interested in ideas of good and evil because I think there’s no real such thing, I think everybody has some of both, and I’m interested in interviewing both scientists and people that have committed atrocities and learning more about that. So that’s something that sort of drives me. I think that we all tend to think of people in those terms – good or evil – but really we’re all complicated. 

    CM: How have your short films been funded? 

    SS: All grants and self-funded. It’s not that expensive for me because I’m doing all the animation myself, but music and post-production – the sound mix, compositing, that’s where the money comes in. I’ve been able to get grants here and there so that’s been very helpful. The places I’ve taught often offer faculty grants that I’ve been awarded, so that’s been helpful. 

    Can you talk about your most recent short film, ‘Disabled: A Love Story”

    ‘Disabled: A Love Story’ is an animated documentary exploring the effect multiple sclerosis (MS) has had on the lives of Terry, now a paraplegic, and her husband/caregiver, Jon. Using audio interviews and expressionistic animation, Jon and Terry describe their difficult journey. Beginning with the diagnosis and continuing through their +35-year marriage, Terry struggles to continue working as a city planner and teaching at MIT while losing her mobility. Jon works as a writer, and together they learn to adapt to each stage of the disease.

    Disabled: A Love Story (Sheila M. Sofian, 2024)
    Disabled: A Love Story (Sheila M. Sofian, 2024)

    As the MS progresses, Terry grows more dependent on Jon. Despite her worsening condition, until recently Terry continued teaching. Jon’s care has made it possible for her to continue working throughout her advanced stage of MS. Jon and Terry describe the emotional and physical toll the disease has taken on them and their relationship. 

    The use of animation allows the audience to empathize with Terry without judging her based on her appearance. The digitally drawn animation and smeared colors create an intimate representation of Terry and Jon’s experiences. Images depicting the situations being described provide an unfiltered look into their circumstances from their point of view. The soft color palette and fluid transitions reflect their heartfelt testimony, capturing each event with intimacy and candor. 

    What are you working on now?

    ‘Undertow’ is a documentary animation that explores and visualizes personal experiences of anxiety, depression, and anger through the medium of painting-on-glass animation. Using recorded interviews, I interviewed several people about their experiences with these conditions and asked them how it felt, what it looked like, and how it affected them.. These testimonies serve as the foundation for the abstract painted animation.

    Using an analogue painting-on-glass technique, I will animate abstract forms that visualize the testimonies. The fluid nature of this medium allows for spontaneous expression, capturing the internal turbulence  and emotional intensity described by the interviewees.

    CM: Would you do another long-form animated film?

    SS: I don’t want to do another hour-long film again, but of course never say never. At this point shorts are more manageable, but it depends on the material. With ‘Truth Has Fallen’ I felt it had to be longer to get the information that needed to be in there. So, it depends on the quality of the information I get and if I can make it work in a short film, or if it needs to be extended. 

    CM: Do you teach documentary and animation to your students?

    SS: I have been teaching a Documentary Animation Production class since 2010. In this class we study documentary animation films made around the world and the students collaborate on a film. I then enter the finished films in film festivals. Some of them have done very well – you can view the films here.

    When I’ve taught production courses before they’ve been more of a studio model where you’d had one director, an animator, a designer, etc. But the way I’ve taught this class is that everybody is an independent filmmaker so every single student is the director. It invites chaos, but at the same time each student gets to try every single step of production, from choosing the story to transcribing and editing, and the actual animation. So they all have to participate in every part of production. 

    CM: Do you feel that documentary animation is picking up momentum? 

    SS: I really do. I think there’s just a bigger desire for social justice and activism in general, so I think that probably has something to do with it too.  When I was giving a workshop in Colombia, they were excited about animated documentary because it was dangerous for them to do live action documentaries, but animation was a way for them to express themselves in a safe environment. As far an animated documentary here in the US, I think it’s a way to use your art to express yourself and I think people who are animators are drawn towards non-fiction to express themselves. As artists and filmmakers and animators we want to be able to use our craft to express ourselves and make something that’s about something. Not that fiction can’t be, but I think documentary… there are so many voices that need to be heard.

    CM: In terms of the other work that you see, have you noticed there being changes in animated documentary trends?

    SS: I do see more varied techniques such as stop-motion and CG. I’ve seen much more cutting-edge experimental documentary. People are pushing boundaries more and more. Animation can affect you in a different kind of way – where the imagery is so powerful that it kind of shakes you up.

    CM: Animators take a different approach to documentary storytelling.

    SS: And there is value in both. When I was at CalArts experimental animation, they didn’t really tell you HOW to do things, you operated more in a vacuum, but in some ways I think that’s better. When you don’t know what the rules are you invent your own rules, and you can be much more creative – you can fail but you can also hit the truth in extraordinary ways that wouldn’t have been possible if you confined yourself in a box. So I think that it’s exciting, especially when you see films from countries that don’t support filmmaking in general – people inventing it themselves, and creating their own language.

    ___

    ‘Truth Has Fallen’ can be watched in full here. You can find out more about Sheila M Sofian’s work on her website.

    Interview by Carla MacKinnon.

  • Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks. An Interview with Rosie Schellenberg 

    In the new episode of the Animated Documentary Podcast we talk to director Rosie Schellenberg. Rosie has over twenty years of experience making award-winning films and television programmes. Her latest film, Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks, broadcasts on Wednesday 19th November at 21:00 on BBC Two. This stunning biographic documentary, looking at the life of the pioneering painter J.M.W. Turner, includes numerous animated sequences created by animation duo Tjoff Koong (Tezo Kyungdon Lee and Magnus Lenneskog) at Passion Pictures. These animations both reconstruct Turner’s historical environment and evoke his inner experience. The animation in this documentary is sensitive, imaginative and powerful, and is essential to the film’s creative essence.

    We spoke to Rosie about the process of making the film, and what animation can bring to documentary storytelling. Listen to the interview here or read the transcript below.

    Turner sketching in the Alps
    (Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, Passion Pictures, BBC Arena, Tjoff Koong Studios, © 2025)

    CM: Can you give a short introduction about yourself and any highlights of your career that you’d like to mention? 

    RS: I’ve been making documentaries for a number of years. I started out at the BBC as a director, where I had some amazing opportunities to work on series like The Culture Show and on BBC Four, arts projects and history projects. So that was where I cut my teeth in directing. And then I went on to make films for BBC One and BBC Two before becoming freelance and working on formats like Who Do You Think You Are? and Long Lost Family. And it was actually developing a new strand of Long Lost Family called Born Without Trace that I won a BAFTA and an international Rose d’Or – that was about reuniting foundlings, people who’d been left as babies, and using DNA for the first time on television to reunite them with their birth families. And that was a bit of a departure for me, because I’d been doing a lot more of history and arts projects. But it’s through doing that kind of emotional storytelling that’s led me on to do a series of biopics and the most recent one on J.M.W. Turner, the painter, has involved using animation to tell his story. Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks is rooted in these incredible thirty-seven thousand drawings that Turner produced during his life, and they form the spine of the film and offer jumping off points into his psychology. My storytelling is rooted in trying to understand psychology and emotion. Animation opened up a whole world, a sort of imaginative world where we could think about Turner’s life in not only an emotive way, but in an immersive way, in the period and in the style of his work. So it was fusing lots of different elements to communicate the experience of Turner’s life. 

    CM: And was that something that you knew you wanted to use from the beginning of the project, or at what stage did you start to think, ‘okay, animation is a good way to do this’? 

    RS: I was brought on to direct the project, and that decision had already been made because Passion Pictures, the production company behind the film, have a strong animation background. Offering this animated element was a big part in winning the commission because it felt contemporary, distinctive, and rooted in Turner’s own world, rather than using dramatic reconstruction. This felt like an imaginative layer that was appropriate to Turner himself. 

    CM: Had you worked with animation in any of your previous work? 

    RS: I’d used small amounts of animation, mainly for maps or visual clarification, but nothing on this scale. But I had just finished making a drama documentary series, so I was thinking a lot about how to illustrate a biographical story in a way that feels expressive rather than just literal. You know, not just saying or showing what’s being said, but thinking how the visuals can really elevate a story. And what I found in the drama doc series that I’ve been working on is that it was the more subtle, evocative shots that conveyed the story, and I really wanted to bring that through to Turner. I knew what the animation had to illustrate because it was taking the place of something like drama, but it could do a different job for us. It was in place right from the start and the decision about who the animators were going to be helped lead the narrative. 

    CM: Did Passion Pictures have particular animation directors or animators who they knew that they wanted to work on it at that point? 

    RS: Yes, they had put forward Magnus and Tezo as possible animators, though the final decision hadn’t been made. But when myself and the producer, Rosy, saw Magnus and Tezo’s work, we were really captivated by it because it’s a very bold, graphic style and very landscape orientated. So not character and spoken word, but evocative landscapes that felt very contemporary. The palette, the shapes, the movement and the choice of shots was very filmic, and what they tried to do is see everything like through a camera angle, whether that’s like a drone or a POV shot, or looking down on someone’s legs walking. You can imagine a camera being there, so it felt very cinematic. As well as being evocative and landscape based, from the outset I wanted it to be immersive. So in all the shots in the film for the whole hour, there is nothing modern. The interviewees sit against real backdrops in a Georgian location. The shots of places are ones where you can’t see any modern life, and we’ve taken out any telephone poles or satellite dishes. And then, of course, the animation is very much immersing us in that world of two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago. 

    CM: In terms of creative decisions and aesthetics, how much of that came from the animation directors, and how much of it came from you as the overall director of the piece, or from other members of the crew? 

    RS: It was a real team effort. There were two execs on the project and two commissioners. One of them is a very experienced Arts Commissioner, Mark Bell, and he’s seen a lot of animation in various films, and he had some really wonderful steers. As did the exec producers. And I think the key thing that we had to decide was how similar to Turner’s sketchbooks the animation would be and how different. So how much was inspired and evocative of the sketchbooks, but how it moved things on so you wouldn’t get confused. I think it was a challenge that the very element that had got this over the commissioning line was the animation, but you’re dealing then with two 2D elements – animation and sketchbooks. And how are you going to differentiate between them? Getting that right was quite difficult. I’ll give you an example: in the style frames when they generated an element of Turner’s body, like his hand, it was in an outline, a sketched outline, that looked great on a style frame. But when it was animated, it just didn’t quite look real. The blocked out hand looked better, and we had to decide whether we would use these more sketched elements or more blocked forms to illustrate his world. And that just took a bit of time because people had different ideas about it, and it took a while to get it right and make it consistent through the film. 

    Magnus and Tezo’s style was really appropriate for the landscapes, and we got them on board early. And so knowing that they were going to be able to illustrate these landscape and travel sections so brilliantly steered me in the direction of doing the travel sections. So about twenty minutes into the film, Turner goes off to Switzerland and he goes on this wonderful carriage journey, and then he’s up in the mountains. So that was one of the first things I knew we would do, and that would look perfect in Magnus and Tezo’s style. But actually we’re delving into the psychology of Turner and his childhood, and that’s the foundation of his story. And so earlier in the film, we needed to illustrate interior scenes with people like his mother, who had mental health issues. So it was trying to use the style of the landscapes, but in an interior setting, so we did away with a lot of detail. We used planes of color inside on the walls, as if they were like a mountain to try and tie in those different elements. I think it works really well. The interiors have a sort of freshness about them, and a starkness which feels consistent with the rest of the film. 

    Above: Turner’s mother glimpsed through a doorway (L); Turner’s carriage journey to Margate (R) (Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, Passion Pictures, BBC Arena, Tjoff Koong Studios, © 2025)

    CM: You talked a bit about style frames, and obviously there’s preproduction methods that get used in animation which might be different from live action production. Was there anything that you found unfamiliar in that process or anything that surprised you or you found particularly useful? 

    RS: I think there is a clash of cultures when it comes to an edit with a documentary, and particularly one like this, because we had an incredible cast of quite well-known people. Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones; Chris Packham, the environmentalist; Orna Guralnik, the psychologist from Couples Therapy; Tracey Emin; John Akomfrah, the filmmaker; and artist Timothy Spall, the actor who knows everything about Turner’s biography, having played him in Mike Leigh’s film Mr. Turner. None of those people were going to read from any kind of script. They have their own views about Turner, and they all had a different angle to bring to the programme, although of course we steered them in the direction of the story we wanted to tell. And it is a complete biography, so you have certain beats that you need to hit. But they were still going to say their own thing. So when you get into the edit, there’s a lot of shaping to do. There were a lot of moving parts, but of course with animation you need to have it scripted. You need to know what you’re going to say. So balancing all of their incredible contributions and making it a coherent narrative just takes time. Whereas with the animation, we had a schedule – style frames, animatics, moving tests – and it was hard to hit all of those targets when so many elements of the narrative was shifting. Having said that, the beats remained the same, but we did move them around. And so the exact timings of things were impossible to gauge until the end of the offline. So it was quite hard to stick to the schedule in terms of the animatics in particular, and they fell off slightly; it was more style frames and then going straight to animation. So I think due to the parameters of blending documentary with animation, we had to cut our cloth and not go through all of the elements of the animation schedule that would have been possible in a in an ideal world. I think another big problem is that people in documentary don’t want to see black holes, you know, they want to know ‘what are we going to see here? How are the visuals going to really move the story along?’ And we’re like, ‘well, that’s going to be the animation part’. And I think it was hard for everybody to imagine what it was going to look like. And it really wasn’t until the post-production stage that that fell into place. 

    CM: Is there anything that you’ve learned through your production process that you think is worth sharing with others working in animated documentary?

    RS: We were able to build a great relationship between the production team and our fabulous animators, and that was very much thanks to Rosy Rickett on the documentary side and Louise Simpson from Passion Animation. And having got our animation team on early, we were in a good place to get the animation elements into the film early, so in some ways we should have just felt really confident about that and got those style frames done as early as possible. Whereas that decision making did get pushed back. But having said that, I think the bravest thing to do is to commit to your animators, wait until the end of the offline, and then do the animation. And people just have to live with that part of the process. I think the problem with documentaries is you’re often up against a transmission deadline. And luckily we weren’t. So we had the ten weeks for the animation to take place after the end of the offline. There was a healthy buffer zone in the schedule to allow for that to happen. 

    CM: Your approach sounds great in the sense that you had your animators on at the beginning, so you can work with them at the end, but you’ve already been steered by what you know their styles and strengths are. Were you in dialogue with them in those early stages about what would be possible? 

    RS: Yes, we brought them in as early as possible, and they began doing the face development. For a while we were thinking we would show Turner’s face, and one of the big decisions was actually not to show his face and to be a bit more elliptical. So that was something that evolved during the course of the development stages. The animators were very much involved in the early discussions and we got them into the edit as soon as we could. It was Tezo who really began doing the style frames at the beginning, and we sparked up a fantastic relationship through those early conversations, I can only describe it as a kind of telepathy. I’ll give you an example. When we were still thinking about doing Turner’s face, I asked Tezo to create a style frame of young Turner at the age of about ten, and when he showed it to me, having never seen a picture of my son, I promise you it looked exactly like my ten-year-old. It was uncanny. And there were other times when I would be off doing some filming, you know, getting a GV, getting a shot of a church or buildings. And at the same time, Magnus and Tezo would be doing a style frame of what would have been Covent Garden at that time. And I hadn’t really thought that the transition shot would be something I was filming that day. But the style frame and the shots I was filming matched up, and so I was able to create these transitions retrospectively from the live action material, just because we were very much on the same page. So that obviously helped the process. We just were very much aligned and you can’t predict that. But when it happens, it makes the whole process so much easier. 

    Turner by the River Thames, grieving for his father
    (Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, Passion Pictures, BBC Arena, Tjoff Koong Studios, © 2025)

    CM: Can I ask you about sound? I think often the effectiveness of animation is so contingent on sound, and sometimes music. Again, to what extent were you marrying up those draft visuals or those style frames with the kind of music you might be using? At what point did that start to get put together to create the tone? 

    RS: The soundtrack for the film evolved through the course of the edit. We wanted something contemporary, but that was also orchestral and appropriate for the subject matter. The thing that really lifted the animation, which came after the animation had been created, was the sound effects – the wind, the sounds of steps, the birdsong, things like that did really help to evoke the world, especially because they were historic sound effects. I think they really help with the immersion in the world that the animation created. The other important thing was the transitions into the animated world. And we did put a lot of thought into how we did that, and we used sound to kind of give a sort of whoosh into this new world that we were creating. So subliminally, you knew you were going away from live action, and we chose shots and filmed shots that would blend with the animated world. I think the most successful one was actually suggested by our producer, Rosy, and that was to film a pipe, an old Georgian pipe in an ashtray with the smoke weaving up into the air. And that just went beautifully into an animation. 

    CM: Do you think you’ll be working with animation again? 

    RS: Definitely. And I’m thrilled to be in touch with you and to think about different ways that the animation community and whatever I will be working on could work together, and thinking in a more imaginative way about how animation can help with documentary and communicating different things. I think I’m going to go on to work on something that’s a bit more info heavy. But what kind of animation can help with that? Graphics? And how can different elements can be tied together? On the Turner program we did also have graphics, sometimes the sketches animate onto the page, and the historic stills have all been treated so they have a 3D effect. So there was also that element that keeps the visuals lively and interesting. It was great to be able to combine those different elements and see them as quite separate in some ways, but also how they can work together. 

    CM: You mentioned earlier that you studied at Central Saint Martins? 

    RS: I did a foundation course at Saint Martins, and I have kept sketchbooks and done art throughout my career. So I did really feel that working on this and being back in a very visual world, both because of the subject matter and the way we were illustrating it, really connected to a much more creative, painterly world that I was interested in getting into before I got into documentary. So it was a great way of marrying all those interests. 

    CM: It would be wonderful if there were more models for being able to combine those worlds, bring those worlds together, because I think so much of what we see in documentary is about trying to get inside people’s experience. 

    RS: Yeah. And there’s a very limited palette in a way. If you don’t go into animation, you’ve got archive and historic stills and things that you can shoot now. But there is this whole other realm, a 2D realm that can be so expressive. And what Magnus and Tezo achieved, as well as illustrating beats from Turner’s life, is an emotional layer; they somehow captured through the visuals a level of evocativeness that I think people forget visuals can do. So often in documentary you’ve got an illustrated essay, and this is going beyond that, going beyond the spoken word and creating something that really elevates the emotional experience. And I think that’s what animation was able to do in this case. 

    CM: Thank you so much, Rosie. We’ll be tracking your future work, which I hope will involve a lot of animation! 

    __

    Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks will broadcast on Wednesday 19th November at 21:00 on BBC2.

    You can find out more about Rosie Schellenberg’s work at: rosieschellenberg.co.uk

  • Watch online: Animate Accelerate Animated non-fiction panel

    WATCH ONLINE: Animate Projects’ Accelerate Session, exploring the role of animation in a range of contemporary non-fiction creative storytelling contexts. The panel was hosted by Carla MacKinnon and included: journalist, filmmaker, and VR/AR pioneer, Nonny de la Peña; animator and director Samantha Moore; and producer Rebecca Mark Lawson.

  • A Taste for Music: interview with Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan

    Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan is a filmmaker, animator and visual artist based in Hastings. Behnan’s practice borrows largely from Assemblage; any item can be utilised in his work, and his animation style is unpolished, complementing his hands-on approach to filmmaking. His animated documentary A Taste for Music (2022) was his graduation film from the Royal College of Art’s Animation MA, and has shown widely, including at Animafest Zagreb, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and New Chitose Airport International Festival. We asked Jordan some questions about the development and production of the film. 

    Did you study animation prior to coming to the RCA?

    Yeah, I studied at Middlesex University with Jonathan Hodgson, Osbert Parker and Robert Bradbrook.

    And had you done any documentary work?

    I did an apprenticeship for about nine months in Barcelona, learning how to make documentaries. That was with a company called Otoxo. That was mostly handheld, live-action. But I felt I was more of an animator, really. At RCA I did an animated documentary elective with Bunny Schendler.

    When did you begin to develop the idea for A Taste for Music?

    I think it existed in some way a couple of years after my dad died. I’d been to India and Spain, and when I came back, I was living in my dad’s house during lockdown. Being surrounded by his things was a big part of why I made the film. I submitted it as an idea to Screen South, but it never got taken. At that time, I was trying to do it more about the music side of things. My dad used to run a record label. In the second year at RCA we had to come to a tutorial with two film ideas, and most people persuaded me to do the one about my dad. Even then, it started out more on the music side, and then developed into something more about grief and loss and that kind of thing.

    Can you describe your development process?

    The writing began with me just sort of writing different sort of poems, or different pieces, then reassembling them. From there, it moved into an animatic and then constant changes. The writing stayed pretty much the same across nine months at RCA, but the visuals kept changing — probably every two weeks. Deciding what to include and what not to. Originally, I was going to include my brother and sister, but with animation it was easier to have two characters rather than four. So, working with time and restrictions and the medium was also a reason why the visuals changed and changed. The idea of drawing on record sleeves, too, didn’t come straight away. That came from trying out animation tests, then I was like “I could try that”. There’s a lot of dirty old record sleeves knocking about in the world. I’d say the film is about 40% animated on record sleeves.

    How did you integrate all the different visual elements?

    I’d do the animation first, then I’d sort of go over it on record sleeves. And it’s just like traditional hand-drawn on paper. But I’d gather material between it and sort of improvise into it, in and out. That was quite a joy to do, actually. I used these old magazines that he’d collected and, you know, overlay them. Most of it was done physically, not in After Effects. And that made it easier, to make this film. Having an element of planning, but also… it’s character animation and you’d have the character move from A to B, but with these record sleeves, you’ll have holes in the composition, like a removed area of the composition. So, you could kind of play with that and overlay it. It just made it a bit more fun, and easier to make. You could kind of improvise a bit, get a few magazines or whatever, a few record sleeves, and maybe a poster, a music poster or something, and kind of just play with it, together. It had a somewhat experimental approach, in a way.

    Were there techniques you tried and liked but that didn’t make the final cut?

    I did do this kind of abstract triangle-and-circle sort of thing. Visually I liked it, but it didn’t make much sense as a form. Early experiments were a sort of exercise of warming up.

    The film has screened widely. Did you travel with it?

    I went to Zagreb and Stuttgart for international screenings, and I did London International Animation Festival and Edinburgh too. I also went back to Hastings, where I’m from, and had a screening there. A lot of family and friends came. That was a completely different experience — showing it on home territory where people knew the background. That Q&A was the most standout. A friend who was living with me, who knew my dad quite well called me out on part of the scene, saying “wasn’t your dad’s last gig at the Jazz Cafe seeing Ned Doheny play?” He was correct, and in that scene of the film it’s not Ned Doheny it’s La Perfecta. I changed it because I wanted use some of the music featured on my dad’s compilations and the music from his record label, and changing the music helped me tell the story and convey the emotions that are in the film.

    Did you feel torn between truth and story at any point?

    I think it’s 90–95% correct. I still have that sleeve, that he wrote the track list on. Obviously I have a different version of the truth to my brother and sister. I went with what felt honest, or what helped the story to be told, so that I could say what I wanted to say as a filmmaker.

    One striking thing is how the film balances light and dark, and doesn’t idealise your dad or your relationship with him. Was it difficult deciding what to include, and did you feel you had to self-censor at any point?

    There’s a scene where I’m putting the middle finger up. But that was like, almost a bit of a joke. In these times it was just me and him for a lot of it. It gets heated – the sick person isn’t happy because he’s ill, and he’s about to die. And the alive, the son, is kind of annoyed that his dad is angry. And so you do have this conflict. It’s difficult to explain. But the main thing I wanted to censor was any photos when he was, like, skin and bones. One thing you learn in documentary filmmaking is you need to have respect for your subject. And I don’t think he’d be happy to have photos of him like that exhibited. And a lot of these moments aren’t documented. There are photos where he is skinny and bony but not a lot because, you know, people aren’t usually happy at this particular time, so we’re not taking a lot of photos. So, I was trying to show the positive and rewarding memories I had with my dad within the last year I spent with him. And amongst this, animation is a way of documenting the undocumented, and that was what I was doing with the film.

    What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

    I didn’t want to offend my relatives. I made it for them, over anybody else. That was my target audience.

    The film’s online now. Who do you hope it reaches?

    I’m happy with where it is now. It’s a Vimeo Staff Pick, which is great, and it seems like it’s getting viewed so that’s what I’m happy about. Hopefully people will watch it in ten, fifteen years.

    And what are you working on next?

    I’ve got some support to develop a new film. Themes are like repetition, street art, freedom, and anxiety. I can’t say too much yet, but I’m using a style similar to a previous experiment I did, which is a film called Staring at the Wall, Looking at the Floor — sticking hand-drawn animations physically onto walls and floors in urban environments.

    ___

    Jordan Antonowicz-Behnan spends a lot of his time in charity shops and going for walks, and his work is influenced by the things he sees, hears and finds. You can find more of his work on Vimeo and follow him on Instagram.

    Interview by Carla MacKinnon.

  • COME: an interview with Bronwen Parker-Rhodes & Erica Russell

    COME is a hybrid live action and animated documentary, in which fluid handcrafted animation is used to visualize personal and sensitive accounts of female orgasm. The film was made by the powerful daughter-and-mother team of director Bronwen Parker-Rhodes and animator Erica Russell. We asked Bronwen and Erica some questions about their process of making the film.

    You can watch COME here.

    Did you always intend animation to be part of this project?

    BPR: The original idea was always to use animation to illustrate the sensations women feel during orgasm. I’ve worked with my mum a little, but never taken on such a massive project together, it definitely felt like a bit of an experiment. I’ve actually never been a huge fan of animation in documentaries, but my mum’s style is so abstract and unconventional I felt like it could just work.

    How hands-on was the commissioner in terms of how the animation would be used in the film?

    BPR: The film was initially commissioned by The New York Times (I’ve made three films for them previously) and they were pretty hands off. They provided some initial seed funding – along with the Chicago Media Project – but the majority of the production costs were self-funded.

    Did anything surprise you in the process of integrating animation into the project, or in the outcome? 

    BPR: The process for creating the animation was epic. Even though I grew up with a parent as an animator (who worked from home) I was still shocked at how much work was involved. To start with, we wanted to make the animation in the same way Erica always has – without digital intervention. We experimented with different methods to keep the workflow manageable, and eventually settled on a system: Erica would scan her artwork and send it to me, I’d create a line test and send it back, and then we’d review and refine together. Along the way, we’d also meet up in person to brainstorm new ideas.

    Can you talk a bit more about your collaboration? Were you both involved in decisions about which sections would be animated?

    ER: We decided together which pieces I animated, we wanted to create a fluid interpretation and not illustrate the words. I chose loops of action that could be repeated to create rhythm and  abstract allusions to the body so it was never literal.

    Together we decided on duration, color and positioning. After Bron had shot the live action and done the first cut we started working together. We’d do rough line tests and Bron would edit them into the action. We would then decide how to proceed with timing, color and rhythm of the animation. It was definitely a two way process. A lot of the roughs were discarded and or radically altered until we agreed it had the right FEEL. Feeling the action was really what we were after so it took time and experimentation to arrive at the final pieces.

    The animation is wonderfully expressive and refreshingly non-literal. What was the process behind developing the visual language for the animated sections?

    ER: I love to animate the body so that was the basis of the form, and from there I abstracted the imagery so it became more of a feeling and flow – than a literal depiction. Hand drawn animation is full of the accidental and irregularities of real body motion which digital animation lacks, so this was definitely the way to go.

    COME (Bronwen Parker-Rhodes/Erica Russell, 2025)

    There is a strong sense of authorship in the overall film, but also in the animated sections, which have their own flavor. How did you balance/synthesize your personal directorial visions and make it all work together so well?

    BPR: To be honest, I was pretty unsure how/if it would all work together until the film was fully finished. I think the music (which was composed by my husband) really helped to tie everything together. He created a soundscape which doesn’t feel too emotive, yet still adds another very important layer to the piece.  

    Were there any challenges in the bringing together of animation and live action documentary in this project? Do you have any advice for anyone planning to use these forms together in a film? 

    BPR: Besides the obvious cost and time involved in creating hand-drawn animation, I’d say the biggest challenge was the edit. From the start, it was important to me that the body of the film relied on only two visual elements: the wide interview shots of each contributor, and the animation. I didn’t want to include live-action details or cutaways that might distract from the words being spoken. This meant the animation became essential for covering cuts in the women’s interviews, turning the edit into a very intricate jigsaw puzzle. As for advice – I’m not entirely sure! But I do believe animation has the potential to be much more than just illustrative, and I’d love to see it used in that way more often in documentaries.

    _

    You can follow Bronwen Parker-Rhodes on Instagram and Vimeo, and see more work on her website.

    Interview by Carla MacKinnon

  • Animate Accelerate: Animation & Non-fiction

    We are delighted to be working with Animate Projects on their next online Accelerate Session, which will explore the role of animation in contemporary non-fiction creative storytelling.

    Host Carla MacKinnon will be joined by journalist, filmmaker and VR/AR pioneer Nonny de la Peña, director and animator Samantha Moore, and producer Rebecca Mark Lawson. BSL interpretation and closed captions will be provided.

    Join the webinar for free on Tuesday 9 September, 6-7pm.

    Register here.

    L-R: Plunge (dir. Ellie Land, 2024; Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story(dir. Nonny de la Peña, 2027; Visible Mending (dir. Samantha Moore, 2023)

  • Podcast episode: interview with Samantha Moore

    In this new episode of the Animated Documentary podcast, Carla MacKinnon talks to animated documentary filmmaker and researcher Samantha Moore about her creative background, her collaborative filmmaking methodology, developing and funding animated documentaries, and her BAFTA-nominated short film Visible Mending (2023). 

    Samantha Moore is a filmmaker whose interest is in collaborative animation practice. She is interested in hidden and overlooked stories and communities, especially those marginalised by gender, age, socio-economic status, visual accessibility, and geography. Samantha has worked with a variety of groups, from lingerie machinists to microbiologists. She encourages collaborators to claim space inside the frame, and to work together with her in a ‘collaborative cycle’ of feedback. The subjects she has made work about have ranged from competitive sweet pea growing, to archaeology, neuroscience, HIV/AIDs, and her own experience of having twins. Samantha’s work can be found on Her Vimeo channel.

    All episodes

    Episode transcript:

    CM: You have a really rich history in making animated documentaries. Can you talk a little bit about how you started, how that came about as part of your practice?

    SM: Yeah. So I was a self taught animator. I studied English literature and fine art painting at Exeter University. I went to Central Saint Martins and did postgraduate in fine art film where I did animation, and I did oil and glass animation, which was my absolute passion and obsession. I then moved to Shropshire and hadn’t made a film… I’d made a film for Channel 4 for the Air scheme, which was not well received or anybody was interested in at all. And I’d got married and I had was pregnant with twins, and I was just sort of thinking, oh my god, what am I gonna do? And I wanted to make a film about obsession, and so I started researching sweet pea growers in my local area. Sweet peas originate from North Shropshire, and I started interviewing growers at a sweet pea show. I wasn’t interested in making animated documentary per se. I was interested in making just work, I guess. Although, when I look back at it, the film I made at Saint Martin’s called Tarantella was actually an animated documentary about my dad and my relationship with my dad. So perhaps the seeds of it run deeper than I think. But when I made success of Sweet Peas, which was the film, I made that digitally 2D, working with Adam Goddard, the composer in Toronto. When I made that film, it began to be received as an animated documentary. I remember somebody called it a poem and for a while I was going around saying I was an animated poet. And then animated documentary came up, and I was like, oh, yeah. That sounds like what I do. And it coalesced a bit. There was some sort of thinking and talking about the idea of animated documentary. It just all made sense to me, and I found it a very useful label to place on myself and my work. And I did find when I pitched my next film, which was Doubled Up, when I pitched that to Channel 4 and Arts Council, And Animate Projects as was before its current incarnation, I pitched it as an animated documentary very specifically because I knew it was a kind of buzzy term, and I thought that that would be something that they’d be interested in.

    CM: And do you remember that buzz that was around animated documentary at that time? Were there filmmakers or films that that it seemed to be circling around?

    SM: I was obsessed with Caroline Leaf because I had started off as a lawn on glass animator. All her work I had adored. And she obviously made the documentary film, you know, Interview, which was really interesting to me. A is for Autism. Animated documentary felt like something really fresh that was a bit different and a bit new, and I felt like, oh, I can do something with this. This is something that resonates with me.

    CM: In addition to being a a director and an animator, you are also a researcher and an academic. Can you talk a little bit about how that academic dimension or that dimension of research has fed into your practice and changed your practice?

    SM: I have loved the way that that has worked for me. I mean, I’m aware it’s very particular. It’s not gonna work for everybody. But for me, investigating my methodology, articulating, naming, and critiquing the ways that I work has been incredibly helpful. It allows me to think critically about what it is I’m making and why it is I’m making it. I made a film called Eyeful of Sound about audiovisual synesthesia, and I started to give papers at conferences. And I wasn’t at all discerning. I mean, I gave some papers at some amazing conferences, but I just didn’t have a clue about who I was talking to really. I was an academic. I’ve been teaching since I was in higher education since I was 25. And so I felt kind of familiar with that milieu. It felt fairly normal for me to be there. And I did papers at documentary studies conference, neuroscience conference, society for animation studies conference. And everywhere I went, the way I was presenting work was received very differently. It was very interesting. And just kind of coming up against that was incredibly useful to me as a practitioner because I could kinda take those ideas and then try them out in real life. So my, PhD was by practice, and my contribution to original research was about the way that I developed my methodology, which was a collaborative cycle of working with what I called collaborative consultants. Often in documentary, the interviewee is called a subject, and I’m really not keen on that word. I find it quite reductive and and not very helpful. The way that I work, I want the person who is being interviewed for the film to be consulted all the way through. The way they are presented on screen should be something that they also have a say in. And I found that incredibly helpful with the very next film I made after having done my PhD. I could immediately use all those methodological ideas in a way that felt very practical and also very helpful, you know, a very helpful way of working. I knew the things I wanted to do and the things that I didn’t want to do, and I could tell you why I was doing them. And I found that to be really useful.

    CM: You did a number of films with funding from the Wellcome Trust. Do you feel like it was fortunate that the Wellcome Trust were funding the kind of films you wanted to be making? Or did you feel like your interest in what you were making was in part led by there being this pot of funding for that kind of film there at the time?

    SM: It’s a really good question. I mean, I would sort of argue that there wasn’t really a pot of funding for the kind of films I was making, but I could definitely work in the perspective that I needed to in order to get that funding. The funding was about art and science and about how you present that to a public engaged audience. And animation is a wonderful as we know, you know, it’s an incredible medium that can do loads of different things. It can be all things to all people, and everybody thinks that they understand it and nobody’s challenged or threatened by it. So it can be a wonderful Trojan horse to smuggle in ideas. And I felt that working with science was an intellectual challenge. I worked with professor Serge Mostowi in his microbiology lab, first at Imperial College London and then at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And that was wonderful experience, but it was also incredibly hard because everything he does is literally invisible to the human eye. And so working on that material was tricky and difficult, and that’s kind of my wheelhouse. You know, I enjoy the trickiness of trying to do something like that. I think if we’re, you know, all artists, you know, we’re funded by people, artists, filmmakers, funding comes from somewhere. We work with what we have, and I admire filmmakers who go ahead and make work regardless of whether they have it funded. But for me, I’ve always had to had it funded.

    CM: You have had various commissions from the BFI and most notably, most recently, your very successful BFI funded film Visible Mending, which screened in dozens of film festivals, won many awards. Could you talk a little bit about how that film came about?

    SM: It is a film about knitting. It’s a film about the way that knitting is used by an older generation, the interviewees I spoke to all in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, talking to them about how knitting had allowed them to kind of deal with difficult times in their lives and how they’d kind of variously knitted themselves back together, if not perfectly, at least in a functional way. It was inspired by my mum who was a great knitter. She always enjoyed knitting, and knitted for me throughout my life. When she was in her very early sixties, she got early onset Lewy body dementia. And one of the first things that fell out of her head was numbers, so she couldn’t follow a knitting pattern anymore. But she did continue to knit. I’ve got, a an old iPad case here, which is one of the things she knitted when she was demented, which is sort of stripes. And that was all she could manage was different stripes. There’s quite a few stripy things in my house. And it was a solace for myself as much as anything, but in typical animator fashion, I became obsessed with knitting, watched every YouTube video I could, taught myself lots of different techniques, and then began to work together with a scheme called Creative Conversations, which was organized by Media Active in Shropshire. And we got a tiny bit of money to go out and work with older communities about ways in which they might work more creatively. And so I worked with knitters.

    CM: And so you did that initial research. Was that before you applied for the BFI?

    SM: Oh, gosh. Yeah. The BFI funding wasn’t even available then. It was several years before then. But, you know, we have these ideas that we kind of have bubbling away. When any anybody asked me what I was doing next, I always always say I’m making a film about knitting, but I didn’t really I didn’t really have much, idea of how it’s gonna happen. And then creative conversations happened, and then the BFI budget up to a £130,000 became available. And that was absolutely amazing that that was there. And luckily, because I’d done Creative Conversations, I had quite a lot of preparatory work, which isn’t always the case for animated documentary. So much of the work you do is behind the scenes and is unpaid and isn’t funded and has to be done speculatively because you need to prove to people that there really is a thing that you can make the film about, and that can be really tough. So through creative conversations, I had this preparatory work and had a little tester of the animation, which was probably the most helpful thing I did in getting the funding from BFI. I think that that question about pitching an animated documentary is certainly one that comes up a lot. In any kind of documentary, there’s quite a lot of front loading that needs to be done in that pitching process because you need to do your research before you can be getting any significant funding. And in animated documentary, you also need to be showing what it’s gonna look like, how you’re gonna make it.

    CM: Do you have any advice for people who are trying to get an animated documentary made? Things they should be thinking about, the kind of materials they could be producing, or any kind of pitfalls that they should be looking out for?

    SM: I think it’s really hard because I really hate advising people to work for free, and yet that’s what you end up doing most of the time. You know, I think on the whole, we should be paid for our effort and for our our labor. But a lot of the time when you are working on an idea for an animated documentary, you’ve kind of got this dual thing of, on one hand, if you’re a live action documentary maker, you could find lots of people and you could take loads of photographs and you could have some footage, you could have some material, you could cut together into a taster and say, look, this is what I want to make. But with animated documentary, you can do all of that, but with audio, but then you still need to drag together some sort of image. And as I said, with visible mending, having that little clip of an animated mouse was really helpful in just kind of cutting to, oh, this is what it’s gonna look like. So I think my advice would be try and get some kind of visual evidence of how you want it to look. If that’s not completely animated, then might be a mood board or it might be just some production art, just some sense, some strong sense of what your vision is for how this film is going to appear. Because I think it’s really hard. You know, I found the biggest struggle has always with every film I’ve ever made is trying to persuade people that what you want to make is realistic and can actually be realized. And a a lot of the time, they just don’t really know what you’re talking about.

    CM: In documentary, generally, we collect a lot more material than ends up on the screen. Do you have a sense of the kind of ratio of material that you’d have collected in your research, against what actually ended up in the final film, which was eight and a half minutes long?

    SM: Twenty to one? Hours of interview, and then it’s gonna go down to something that is more than likely to be a short. It’s heartbreaking because you know the people. It’s not just a story. It’s somebody’s story, and that’s a massive difference. You feel a responsibility, and you have a responsibility, that somebody has given you access to their their life and their experience, their lived experience, and you’re showing that on screen. And that can be a really difficult thing to justify when you’re cutting all of that conversation, all of those meetings, all of those coffees, the meals, the chats, you know, the crying, and then you’re cutting it down to eight minutes of, you know, snappy content, you can feel a bit brutish. And so developing this idea about keeping the collaborative consultant involved in the filmmaking as it went on, the people in Visible Mending, I did newsletters for them regularly telling them what was happening with the film at all stages of production, getting them involved when they wanted to be involved, asking for their comments. They knitted some of their own puppets, and the ones that they didn’t knit, they chose the patterns which I then knitted the puppets from. Just kind of bringing them into the into the frame and allowing them kind of agency. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s something it’s a way that I can feel comfortable with the way that I make films.

    CM: And have you ever experienced frustration or a feeling that you’ve had to make creative compromises on the work, based on those kind of feedback loops and interactions?

    SM: Yeah. That’s such a great question. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I suppose the most pointed example would be Eyeful of Sound because the people I was working with were audiovisually synaesthetic. They had audiovisual synaesthesia. When I played them sounds, they saw images. They saw movement and shapes and colors and textures. And sometimes they didn’t just see them. They felt them on their skin or they taste them in their mouth. And so if I did something that wasn’t correct, then they would immediately say that’s wrong. You know, it wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t a discussion. It was a fact. And so that was an incredibly laborious process of sending them my animation of what they described to me and then having them send back with notes and notes and notes and saying, no. This isn’t right. And that was brilliant because it really thickened my skin to the whole thing of being told no by your collaborative consultant.

    CM: In what way do you think that changes the director role from that traditional role of the creative lead, the creative visionary who is making those decisions?

    SM: I challenge that kind of that role anyway. And I think in animation, very often, the role of the director is also the role of the animator, also the role of the producer, also the role of the sound recorder, also the role of the tea maker, because we do it all because we have to. In independent animated shorts, you know, you end up doing lots of jobs. But, no, I take your point. And I think that as far as the kind of decision making goes, you’re the one who went in there with the idea. You’ve chosen who to interview. I interviewed lots of people for Visible Mending, and I ended up kinda choosing a small circle and then adding to that circle as I found different perspectives that I wanted to hear from. So it was all my decision. There are different modes where you have to be in listening mode, you have to be in receiving mode, and then there are other points where you’re pulling it together. I mean, I’m my own editor as well. I edit my sound. I edit my image. So I have to make editorial and directorial decisions there. Well, I’m not asking for anybody’s help on that. Those are the points where I’m like: now I’m the director, and I must put it together. Because at the end of the day, in order for it to be a coherent piece of work, it needs to have a person who’s driving it, and that person has always been me.

    CM: As you say, often, particularly in short film, we take on multiple roles. For Visible Mending, though, it was your first stop motion film, and you were working with a studio for the stop motion side, and you did have a producer. Can you talk about who you worked with, how those collaborations worked, what worked well, and if there was anything that didn’t work so well?

    SM: Yeah. I mean, I must say, I’ve been really lucky, though. I’ve almost always worked with a producer, and I really value that role. So I worked with Tilly Bancroft. It was her first time producing animation, although she had lots of experience in stop motion animation. And because it was her first time, we also had exec producers who were Sue Gainsborough from Media Active and Abigail Addison from Animate Projects. So it was a really nice kind of core team. It was weird not animating everything myself. And I did kind of write in one of the characters was represented by 2D animation, and I have to say I did kind of keep that bit so that I would have some animation to do. I think that was part of my in retrospect, I can admit that to myself, because I felt quite odd about not animating the film itself. But I am not a stop motion animator, and I work with incredibly talented stop motion animators. And so I worked with Second Home Studios in Birmingham. That was really interesting because they’re a commercial studio who do a lot of very high end commercial studio work. And it was fascinating kind of plugging into that whole world so different from independent animation as I had experienced up to that point, you know, as a kind of solo worker working occasionally with people remotely. But, essentially, it takes the time it takes. Whereas when you work with a commercial studio and stop motion, it’s obviously very labor intensive. Everybody needs to be on set. Everyone needs to be there. I really enjoyed it. I found it enormously challenging and frustrating at times, but only because, you know, I was boundaried by my own inadequacies and needed to work out how to solve problems.

    CM: Is there any wisdom that you feel you got from that that could be worth sharing or that you’ll be taking forward into your practice moving forward?

    SM: One of the main things was the way space is experienced. You know, in 2D animation, space is infinitely malleable. It can be whatever you want it to be. In in stop motion animation, space is very finite. You know, it’s the size of your set. And you can use, you know, foreshortening, and you can use tricks and lenses and set design to make it look different. But, ultimately, you’re really boundaried by physical constraints, and that isn’t something I’d ever had to do before. So understanding the kind of practicalities of what stop motion and three-dimensional animation means, I’d I found a challenge and definitely made mistakes. I think I learned a lot, but I’ve still got loads to learn as well. I haven’t quite learned it all yet.

    CM: If you could go back and do that process again, is there anything that you would have done differently in R&D or preproduction phases to prepare yourself for that?

    SM: I think I needed more experimental time. I love experimenting. I love playing with with film, with with with animation. You know, it’s what I love about it is its infinite possibilities. I think I needed more time to experiment and mess around.

    CM: Can you talk a little bit about the, the significance of materiality in your work?

    SM: I’m kind of obsessed with, as a documentarian, what the physical material of the work says about the content of the film. In the same way that inviting the collaborator into the frame seems really important, I feel the material is also a collaborator that you need to work with, and you really need to listen to them and hear what they’re telling you. You know, when you work with knitted wool, when you work with crocheted wool, when you work with embroidery or felting or paper or silk. You know, I made Bloomers that was printed on silk and, you know, and crepe and crocheted lace. And each one of those materials told a different story to the audience regardless of what was being said on the voice over or what was being described with the visuals.

    CM: There’s been some nice theory around filmmaking, where ideas from actor network theory are applied, where you have all your human actors who would be your crew and your creative consultants, creative collaborators. And you have your nonhuman actors who would be your materials and your software and your hardware, and they all have agency.

    SM: Exactly. If you watch if you watch Bloomers, the bit on silk, that silk does not wanna be on camera. She is running off. She is, like, she is wonky.

    CM: I imagine you’ve come across a lot of animated documentary productions in your teaching and also in film festivals. Do you have anything that you just consider an animated documentary sin?

    SM: I find animated documentary fascinating, really interesting. Normally, if a subject is interesting enough for somebody to make a film about, particularly an animated film, you know, has got some integral kind of kernel of something really interesting about it even if it’s just to the filmmaker. I find it least interesting when it is a voice over saying something and then an image that says exactly the same thing because that’s the exact opposite of the idea of the kind of, you know, materials having agency because you’re not really listening to the materials or, you know, telling the story in a different way. So for me, telling and showing is not so fascinating. You know, that’s a bit dull. Gunnar Strøm calls it, you know, the animated radio interview. And I think if it works as a radio interview, then why does it need to be animated?

    CM: The Royal College of Art, where you are the program leader in animation, has a really rich history of producing animated documentary. It used to have even an animated documentary pathway in its program. So could you talk a little bit about that relationship and history that the RCA has with animated documentary?

    SM: I think it’s always fascinating at RCA, there’s always a really strong interest in animated documentary as a form, and there are often incredibly dedicated and interesting animators who come through here wanting to do something with animated documentary. I think it’s really interesting why so many people gravitate towards animated documentary. My theory is that animated documentary is so resolutely never for children, you know, almost never for children, which animation is often assumed to be. And by their nature, there’s an assumption that there’ll be some seriousness at the root of them. And I think that if you’ve got something to say and you want it to be serious and you want to be talking to your peers, not necessarily to a younger audience, then animated documentary is a real home for people who want to have their voice heard.

    CM: Can you tell me what you’re working on now?

    SM: I’m working on a longer form piece. I kind of became really obsessed about knitting and crocheting and making. And I found lots of stories about the way people had used textiles to process really awful things, usually grief. And our film was featured in the New York Times and had so many comments, and every single one of them was incredibly rich and interesting. Lots of people telling stories of their own around their family or around experiences they’d had. And I just became very interested in the way that making textiles, it can be used as a way of kind of processing, but also maybe displacing the grieving process. Obviously, you know, I’ve talked about my mom already, and so I lost her, and that was, you know, a tricky thing. I’ve got entire quilts in my house that I’ve made at times at times of stress. I start sewing. And I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism or if it’s just a displacement activity, but I became interested in people doing this. So I’ve been talking to lots of interesting people, some of whom are dealing with grief at losing a child or losing fertility or losing a marriage. Others are grieving about entire ecosystems. So we’re putting together an idea about about that. It’s called The Fabric of Grief.

    CM: Thank you so much, Sam. It’s been fascinating conversation. And where can people find your work?

    SM: You can find it all on Vimeo. You can find Visible Mending there. You can also find it on the New York Times website.

  • Jeremy, my Father: An interview with Miranda Peyton Jones 


    Miranda Peyton Jones is a filmmaker and moving image artist specialising in analogue and stop-motion animation. Jeremy, my Father, her 2022 graduation film from Kingston School of Art, is a short animated documentary that navigates bereavement following suicide. The film has screened widely and received numerous accolades, including a Royal Television Society award and a British Animation Awards nomination. We asked Miranda some questions about her film and creative practice.

    Can you tell us about how Jeremy, my Father emerged – why did you feel it was time to tell this story, and why was animation the right way to do so? 

    This film came about in a very slow, meandering way; initially I had not intended to make such a direct work about my grief. It felt way too large of a topic to tackle. So I started with an idea to make a piece of moving image that spoke about my family’s ties to the sea. Keeping the project so vague felt more comfortable at first, but as it progressed, it became clear that I only had one thing on my mind: Dad. 

    Inevitably my experiments and research kept being drawn back into what I was dealing with there and then, and before long I had started delving into all the memorabilia that my Dad had left behind. Before I fully committed to a project about my grief, I spoke to my Mum and siblings to see how they felt about the idea. Their support felt like the blessing I needed to start constructing and thinking about my ideas for how to communicate this loss to an audience. It wasn’t particularly a chosen ‘right time’ to explore this, but something that felt so necessary that I almost didn’t have a choice but to try. 

    You use a mixed media approach including archive and animation. Can you talk about the creative process and the decisions behind it?

    I chose to use analogue animation for the project. I had so much archival material from my dad that I wanted to record and document, so using them physically in the project felt like a good way to do this. I didn’t want to have static and lifeless records of all these items either, so bringing them to life through animation provided the intrigue and emotion that each object held for me. It is also a medium I feel comfortable expressing myself in, the tactility brings such a closeness with an audience that felt very important for this work. 

    The film tells a very personal story; were there challenges for you in working with this subject matter?

    It was very challenging at times, moments of creative excitement were made strange by also holding the reason behind the work. Overall it felt so necessary for me to make this work and sometimes it felt quite good that I was putting in so much energy and effort into doing something for my Dad, I felt like I was honouring his memory. People have often asked me if making the film was cathartic, but I really hesitate to say it was. It didn’t feel like I was making my grief more manageable, or helping me with my feelings of loss. But it did make me feel like what I was doing had a bigger purpose, so that was positive. 

    The film has been very well received; have there been any particular screenings or responses that have surprised or pleased you?

    It’s been entirely surprising. I made this film as an undergraduate, and any ideas of recognition outside of my academic circle felt wildly unrealistic to me! I only started sharing the film more widely after encouragement from my wonderful tutor Evgenia Gostrer (who was a huge support and mentor for the project). Her notion that it would resonate with audiences was completely correct. Each time someone shares their own experience with grief, or how this film made them feel, I am grateful that I’ve made this work. I’ve kept a record of every written response I received, which feels like an archive of interest in itself. Especially the responses where people share a story or two of their own. The time taken to share the impact the work has had is so precious to me. 

    A particular screening that felt so monumental to me was for the British Animation Awards, imposter-syndrome in hand, I went feeling so out of place but came away with a feeling that grief is so entirely universal, and we could all  use some time for it.

    Jeremy, my Father (2022)

    What are you working on now?

    I’m currently in the research stage of my next project. I’m exploring the ways people have had to overcome physical differences/limitations in their creative practice. This idea has come about after unfortunately having extensive surgery on my right hand. Being a right handed artist, it has been a challenge, one where I’ve had to think creatively and make adjustments. The main adjustment is working with my left hand which can be liberating yet frustrating. 

    I’m screening some preliminary work at FishTank Workshop and Gallery on the 31st of July. At it’s current stage the work is exploring my own experience, but I want to open the project out and work with other creatives (in any field) who have had to change their process for physical reasons. 

    You can follow Miranda Peyton Jones’ work on her website and Instagram. She is currently artist-in-residence at FishTank Workshop & Gallery whilst also working as a freelance animator in London. 

    Interview by Carla MacKinnon.

  • Animated documentary at the Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference

    The Society for Animation Studies (SAS) wrapped up its annual conference yesterday, following four days of talks, panels, and screenings (and one rowdy animation pub quiz). As ever, the event brought together animators and scholars from around the world to discuss a dizzying range of animation-related topics. The conference theme – Sustaining Animation – established its position as one of serious engagement with ‘real world’ issues from the outset, and themes around animated documentary were well represented, both in panels specifically dedicated to the form, and across other areas of research.

    Dr Yijing Wang spoke about the use of ethnographic animation on themes of ‘oral literature’, while Yunhuan Tan discussed animated documentary and digital animation practices – including generative AI – as tools for preserving and revitalizing embroidery traditions in minority communities. He argued for animated documentary’s use to preserve endangered cultural heritage, focusing on embroidery and textile tradition as a practice that carries collective memory and tradition, as ‘patterns encode myths, rituals, blessings’.

    Dr Mary Martins presented her work around the histories of African and Carribean communities in London’s Thamesmead through documentary and animation. Her project Made in Thamesmead (2024), Addresses a lack of black British representation in Thamsemead’s – and wider British – archives. Intersecting with social science and humanities, Martins explained that the project uses animation ‘as a representational and archival tool’ in archiving histories that haven’t been well documented or preserved, as well as as an ‘effective collaborative tool to address social and political injustice’. Martins described how her mixed media ‘collage’ approach top the work can allow juxtaposition within a frame, emphasizing the and exploring the complexity of her subject matter.

    Made in Thamesmead (dir. Mary Martins, 2024)

    Emily Ramsay outlined the structure and outputs of a 12-week animated documentary course at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Ramsay described the course, which was founded by Miriam Harris in 2015, and which produces some punchy and well produced 40 second nonfiction pieces by students, as ‘connecting abstract ideas to lived experience’ and promoting animated documentary as a ‘way of seeing’.

    Animator Xue Han described her work on the collaborative animated documentary Hunger by the Sea (dir. Sue Sudbury, 2018). She described how she conceived the images for the film, listening to recorded interviews and imagining the speakers, and discussed the way in which the project initiated a transformation of her identity from a commercially-directed animator, to a research-led animator, and ultimately to a practice-led research, as she now works with animation ‘not as a product but as a method of research’.

    Hunger by the Sea (dir. Sue Sudbury, 2018)

    Terry Wragg from the Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) discussed LAW’s ongoing work with animated documentary, participatory and socially engaged filmmaking, while Dr Samantha Moore’s talk offered insight into her process of creating an Enhanced Audio Description for the animated documentary Visible Mending (2023).

    Dr Sally Pearce spoke about the animation of memory, and how the ‘meditative’ process of animation can facilitate the breaking of taboos and working through of trauma. Her talk included reference to a number of 1970s women’s independent animations that could now be categorized as animated documentary although at the time of release they would not have been.

    Anitha Balachandran’s presentation looked at a history of public health films about malaria, using films that mingled science with contemporaneous colonial morality to show early animated documentary as at times little more than ‘state sponsored propaganda’, promoting racism, misogyny, and prejudice.

    Private Snafu vs. Malaria Mike (Warner Bros, 1944)

    Dr Alex Widdowson discussed his practice-based work on animated documentary ethics and showed a teaser for his feature film in development, an animated documentary on the neurodiversity movement, whicle Gunnar Strøm described ‘three affinities of animation, especially animated documentaries’, as stylization (simplifying a subject), distillation (capturing its essence), and generalization (making it relevant to all).

    Animation and politics was well covered. Dr Reza Yousefzadeh Tabasi spoke about the use of generative AI by the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Movement to create large quantities of animated political content, and the benefits of this, while Maryam Mohajer, in discussion with Karen Redrobe, described the relationship of her fictional films to her own lived experience and personal memories.

    Dr Susan Young described how the influence of the lecturer Ray Fields at Liverpool Polytechnic in the 1980s informed her move toward nonfiction and socially engaged approaches to animation. She explained how her film Thin Blue Lines (1981), about the Liverpool 8 uprising, gave her an opportunity to produce animation directly about the world around her. The ‘meditative’ process of the animation also eased her mental health problems of the time and this understanding continued through her career, ultimately to her practice based PhD which explored ways in which animation can ‘process or metabolise trauma’. 

    Vincenzo Maselli’s paper on the feature autobiographical film No Dogs or Italians Allowed (2022) showed how the interaction between the director’s hand and voice and the puppet means that ‘ the director is an archivist in the film’ who ‘tries to fill the gaps’ in his memory through the narrative provided by the puppet of his grandmother. He described how the film uses the potentials of stop-motion ‘to reimagine history made out of touch, fragility and reconstruction’ and how the director ‘gives meaning and specific roles to each material used in the narrative’. 

    Laryssa Moreira Prado’s talk explored self-representation by women and feminist aesthetics in Brazilian animation, particularly focusing on two short films: O Projeto do Meu Pai (2016) and Guaxuma (2018). Agathe Pias spoke about animated autobiography, looking at the use of materiality, technique, and reflexivity as a ‘narrative element’ in films, and giving examples to illustrate the suitability of animation to represent ‘complex blurry concepts’, also discussing No Dogs or Italians Allowed and Guaxuma alongside other films. 

    Guaxuma (Nara Normande, 2018)

    I couldn’t be everywhere in this rich and sprawling conference and no doubt missed many other fascinating talks and discussions around animated nonfiction. I’m looking forward to seeing what publications and further research spring from the work presented. Congratulations to the Society for Animation Studies and the conference hosts London College of Communication for a successful and memorable event.

    The full schedule and all abstracts for the 2025 Society for Animation Studies Conference can be found here.

    Article by Carla MacKinnon

  • Sutures et Consolation: an interview with Blanche Malet

    Blanche Malet is an artist and filmmaker based in London and Paris. Her short animated documentary Sutures et Consolation (Stitches and Solace) was made in 2023, during her Masters degree at Royal College of Art. The film, which takes an autoethnographic and multimedia approach to exploring grief, has played at festivals and galleries internationally, including the BFI Future Film Festival. We talked to Blanche about her film and her wider practice.

    Sutures et Consolation is a very personal film. What made you decide to tell this story as an animated documentary?

    A couple of years ago, just after my father passed away, I felt the urge to process the experience of his loss in some kind of way. I think I was struggling to comprehend what had happened, because it happened so quickly, only four months after his cancer diagnosis. At the time, I was practicing contemporary dance quite a lot, and we had to choreograph a solo, so I thought of addressing what had just happened. But it felt too raw, and I wasn’t ready mentally to deal with it. 

    During my masters at RCA, we had to pick a subject for our grad film. I first picked the solitude of the elderly (because many old people fascinate me). During a crit session, a tutor suggested I work on something closer to my experience (I kinda feel like an old lady, but I get what the tutor meant). So I naturally decided to work on my experience of grief, as it felt like I was finally ready to address it. 

    Were there any challenges in working on such a personal subject matter? 

    I was quite scared that it would upset me at first. My tutor suggested that I could reach out for help with the College’s emotional support department. But I also felt that expressing it with an animated documentary could help me cope with my loss in an unprecedented way. I guess I was inspired by many artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, who used their practice as an emotional outlet, to process their traumas. 

    Working on such a personal matter meant I had to expose my story to tutors and students from the RCA, which felt quite uncomfortable, especially as grief is a taboo subject, so people don’t usually know what to say, or how to act when a griever tells about their experience. 

    You have talked about autoethnographic processes in relation to your work. Can you tell us a little about this?

    I approached autoethnography as an exploration of my emotions that I had buried deep underground and was about to excavate. So once I decided to work on my father’s loss, I sat down one night and addressed him a letter, describing  what losing him felt like, at the time of his death and now (then), four years later. This exercise meant that I had to reminisce my thoughts and feelings from the couple of days preceding and succeeding my father’s passing, which were still quite vivid. I then used this material to create a script, that expressed what this experience of loss felt like. I also asked my family to provide me with any visual material they had of my father. One of the videos is at the end of the short film. 

    You used mixed-media techniques in the film. Can you talk about the production process?

    Indeed, my film is composed of hand-drawn charcoal and pastel animations, stop-motion hand stitched thread on paper as well as a video extract from personal archive. I used a rostrum and DragonFrame to capture my drawings. My animation technique consisted of drawing with charcoal, taking a picture, erasing it, and drawing again. I animated some of the most intricate scenes on my Ipad, before drawing them on paper with the rostrum. Straight ahead animation can be quite technically challenging! 

    At work in the studio at the RCA

    Were there any particular influences for the film?

    Yes definitely! A major influence is William Kentridge and his charcoal animations. Kentridge was actually one of my father’s favourite artists so it is one of the reasons why I chose to get inspired from his animation style. I think I was also inspired by Father and Daughter by Michaël Dudok de Wit, a film that is very different from mine, but which I admire a lot, and touches on a similar subject. 

    The work has screened in festivals, how has it been to watch it with audiences?  

    It was quite weird to be honest, thinking that my intimacy was exposed to random people in Greece, Poland and of course in the UK. But very grateful I got to show my work!

    What are you working on now?

    Currently I’m more in the research and writing phases. I’m working on two scripts, one for a short animated fiction inspired by my family’s immigration story (that might be a feature at some point in a loooong time) and a feminist thriller series, mixing animation and live-action, that will hopefully see daylight on screen some day. 

    You can find more of Blanche Malet’s work on her website and Instagram. Interview by Carla MacKinnon.