Thesis Working Title: Exploring the animated documentaries performative, subjective nature, and how this can impact viewer engagement.
This thesis will look into areas such as:
.Concepts of the performative nature in documentary through enactment and re-enactment.
.Interview through animation and aesthetic considerations that exemplify storytelling.
.Understanding of empathetic engagement with animated agents and facial expression.
For the initial thoughts and considerations for my thesis proposal, I want to navigate the forced performative and subjective nature of animated documentaries, and how this affects viewer engagement. This thesis aims to bring to attention arising issues surrounding the contemporary animated documentary, without the primary focus being its genre validity but rather bringing to attention how effectively the subjective, personal experience can be enhanced through this documentary method for audiences. Considering this against its live action counterpart,this could potentially go on to argue its genre validity or deny its place in the field. The exploration of this topic should support my overall final major animated project as I wish to create a re-enacted animated performance of filmed interview footage and will help gain an understanding of what viewers inventive engagement with more to enhance personal factual storytelling in animated form.
Following on from my previous research into trauma representation in animated documentary form, I feel this will be a great way to expand on personal recollection and expression portrayal through animation in non-fictional contexts as well as confessional and aesthetic elements to the interview itself.
Lastly I think these views and Ideas can be accentuated and proven more matter of factually by scientific investigation with audience empathetic engagement and see how this inevitably bridge the link between artistic expression and effective audience communication.
As mentioned in Richard M. Balsam’s book Non-Fiction Film a Critical History, he expands on Dai Vaughan’s point about how in the first ever moving image displayed in Paris 1895, the crowd seemed not so much fearful of the moving imagery itself, but more the ‘spontaneity’ it could demonstrate that the theater could not (1992, p.5) .
“The Cinema Is the illusion of the Real . But more it is a spectacle of movement. And as such at times it seems to exceed reality itself” (Steven Neale in Barsam, 1992. p.5)
In the above quote provided by Neale I think it brings to attention the idea that in drawing attention to the idea of movement, rather than direct, real life movement itself, points out how its effectiveness with viewers and audience surrounding this idea of ‘spectacle’ over reality that creates a form of ‘hyper realism’.
References
Barsman, R M. 1992. Non-Fiction Film A Critical History Revised and Expanded. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.