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.

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.