‘Does this look right?’ Working Inside the Collaborative Frame

Abstract

This chapter is written from, and critically examines, the creative and ethical perspectives of animated documentary practitioners. The author, Samantha Moore, focuses particularly on collaboratively ethnographic approaches to, and examples of, animated documentary filmmaking. This chapter asks to what extent the frame within an animated documentary can become a collaborative, co-authored space that creates truly dialogic images. It also enquiries as to how practitioners do or could go about creating, negotiating and sustaining such forms of collaboration. The chapter discusses key examples from the filmmaking practices of the author and her peers, including Shira Avni, who works with the Down syndrome and autistic communities. It does so in order to outline what impacts different forms of collaborative filmmaking approach might have for audience, filmmakers, and documentary subject-participants, especially in the contexts of documentary films that aim to give a voice to marginalised and unrepresented human perspectives.