INTRODUCTION: THE TROUBLE WITH THE TROUBLE WITH LOVE AND SEX

The above quote from documentary interview footage used in the production of my and producer/director Zac Beattie's animated documentary The Trouble with Love and Sex (2011), a project commissioned as part of BBC2's Wonderland series, is indicative of a question that greatly preoccupied us as filmmakers during the making of the work. How do you go about creating an animated documentary using material as emotionally challenging (and thus, potentially off-putting) as this without alienating the mass audience that a BBC commission gives you the opportunity to engage with? The Trouble was about real people using the services of Relate, a British relationship counselling organisation, and was to be the first full-length animated documentary broadcast on British TV. Contributors had agreed to share extremely painful personal information; by using animation to preserve their anonymity, it was hoped they might feel less self-conscious about expressing their feelings. An initial rough cut was derived from video footage of counselling sessions, interviews and video diaries: that material was powerful, moving and, at times, very dark. However, I was concerned that, once introduced into the film-in-progress, animation might fail to deliver the same emotional intensity as the live-action footage we had recorded. This had the potential to be doubly problematic, in that (as noted above) the project's use of animation was one major factor in securing contributors’ participation and consent in the first place. This essay will therefore provide a reflective account of the ways in which I and my collaborators adapted challenging documentary interview content, reworking it as animation, and thus developing distraught, angry and badly behaved real-life voices into sympathetic animated characters populating an accessible and stimulating film for a mass audience (see also Beattie 2011).