INTRODUCTION

As artists we often start a project with a list of self-interrogatory questions. For example: Why use animation for this work? Why make animation in the documentary genre? What is it specifically that only animation can document? In the process of trying to answer this last question, I have in my creative practice looked at one of the things that animation can passably attempt to document: the subjective processes that unfold inside someone else's head. In order to represent such subject matter, one might imagine that collaboration could be necessary. Therefore, I have been thinking about the idea of ‘the collaborative frame’ within an animated documentary context. What is it? Why would we need one? How would we use it and produce film work within it?

The works this chapter discusses in terms of the collaborative frame are films that Paul Wells (1998: 122) describes as being in the ‘penetrative’ mode: ‘penetration’, he argues, ‘is essentially a revelatory tool, used to reveal condi-tions or principles which are hidden or beyond the comprehension of the viewer’. On a closely related note, Annabelle Honess Roe describes animated documentary used in this way as ‘evoking’ (2013: 25) a particular state of mind precisely in order to express the ‘world in here’ (ibid.: 106). Working with this critical context in mind the films discussed in this chapter all attempt to use animation as a vehicle to communicate the internal experience of their human documentary subjects rather than that of the filmmaker themselves. The films deal with different kinds of internal experiences, but all endeavour to achieve a collaborative approach to their documentary gathering, authentication and communication of their subjects’ experiences: from being an artist with Down's syndrome to having synaesthesia.

In my filmmaking practice the collaborative nature of what goes on inside the frame, and how to develop a methodology which supports that collaboration, is something that increasingly interests me. On one level, my work in nonfiction animation has always included aspects of collaboration with the film's human subjects by simple necessity. For example, doubled up (2004), a film about multiple births, was autobiographical and included rotoscoped images of my twin sons, as well as images made by them, their voices, and the voice of Jane Denton, head of the Multiple Births Foundation at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London (Figure 12.1).