Animation Becoming Popular Documentary Solution
At Sundance in 2007, I witnessed filmmaker Brett Morgan rock the festival with rotoscoping scenes that were edited with courtroom transcripts, read by actors. In the past decade, animation has become a popular part of the documentary filmmaker’s palette.
In our own Accelerated Post program, we’ve been editing three documentaries that use animation to solve common problems: illustrating past events that weren’t filmed, and evoking inner or altered states, such as dreams and hallucinations.
To visualize historical events, Matej Silecky’s Baba Babee Skazala and Mimi Malayan’s The Stateless Diplomat: Diana Apcar’s Life employ beautiful, hand-drawn animations–artfully edited with talking heads.
And to conjure non-material states, Cathy Zheutlin’s Living While Dying uses animated interludes to evoke life’s final mystery.
But this year, Erin Palmquist’s award-winning From Baghdad to the Bay took animation to an inspiring new level.
By the time I came on as a story editor from the Fine Cuts consultation program, Palmquist had an interesting, soundbite-driven rough cut about the horror of homophobia in Iraq. In her words, “We had a lovely … err… podcast. But, what would the visuals be?”
With no photographs or footage of their protagonist’s arrest and torture, Palmquist faced a tough cinematic challenge. Turning to a local college animation department, she and her team produced two stunning looks by 1) stitching together 10,000 hand-treated frames of Department of Defense footage, and 2) animating hand-drawn illustrations.
The before-and-after results were so compelling that I recommended moving the visually-emotive torture scenes to the end of each act climax, leveraging their dramatic clout.
From Baghdad to the Bay won the Jury Award for Best Documentary at this year’s Cinequest. Congratulations, Erin!
Whether you need a fundraising trailer cut or a feature doc edited, we currently have a talented editor—who’s both kind and fast–available this spring and summer. Email me to learn more.
