Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

Abstract

The increased use of digital-based animation techniques within primetime television documentary series needs to be viewed in the context of a number of challenges to the documentary genre emerging from a more competitive television broadcasting environment. Since the 1990s television producers looking for a more cinematic and popular aesthetic have integrated computer-media imaging (CMI) and computer-generated imaging (CGI) into documentary practice, layered into a text either in-frame or in-sequence. Patterns in the ways these animation techniques have been used can be grouped into three key modes: ‘symbolic expositional’, ‘graphic vérité’ and ‘invasive surveillance’. The development of these modes has expanded the means of (television) documentary representation, and been closely associated with the emergence of more playful and layered mediations of social and historical knowledge.