Last Seen: Katie Kelly

RESEARCH STATEMENT

Background

In memory studies, memories are described as performances of the past that require a medium to be transmitted into the presence (Plate and Smelik 2013). While highly personal, memories are socially constructed, or as Maurice Halbwachs holds: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localise their memories” (1992, 38). And this construction is “fluid and flexible,” as memories are “conceptualised as something that does not stay put but circulates, migrates, travels; it is more and more perceived as a process, as work that is continually in progress, rather than as a reified object” (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen 2016, 1).

I am a documentary filmmaker. That is, I am interested in real people's experiences and memories. To me, documentary filmmaking is relational much more than empirical. It is performative, just like the memories it attempts to capture. And so, Last Seen: Katie Kelly (Meissner 2023) explores computer-generated animation as a way to visualise the performativity of memory.

Documentary film is a visual medium that, most often, tells stories about the past - stories that can no longer be seen but only retold. Archival footage and interviews have been used to overcome this challenge, as have re-enactments and more poetic modes. Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) is possibly still the most widely known example of a fully animated documentary film. It uses animation to visualise a past that has little archival footage and memories that are half forgotten and filled with trauma. Similarly, in Everything’s For You (Ravett 1989), filmmaker Abraham Ravett uses animated sequences to visualise events that he cannot fully comprehend (Ravett 2011). Animation foregrounds the performativity of memory. It can bridge the empirical world of historic events, people and places, with the internal world of memories, thoughts and emotions. Therefore, animated documentaries might add “something” to the viewing experience or at least change the way audiences engage with the subject matter. They might, as Andy Glynne suggests, liberate documentary “from its traditional prison-house of photographic observationalism” by playing witness to personal memories rather than attempting to evidence them (2013, 73).

Animation does not claim authenticity as much as live action film does. While the photographic image captures reality and makes it immortal (Doane 2007), animation frees itself from this responsibility, thereby allowing the performative element of imagining coming to the fore. It offers the chance to “escape from the indexical qualities inherent in film” (Gageldonk et al. 2020, 2) and “broadens the limits of what and how we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of seeing” (Honess Roe 2013, 2).

Rather than having to seek the rational and satisfy a historical need to “document,” animated documentary thus affords the filmmaker to be just a little more intuitive – manifesting a world on screen that never existed off it, for memories that had never been seen and can therefore simply travel from the imagination of one individual (the protagonist) to that of another (the filmmaker). I believe this is what Erik Knudsen (2008) calls for when he advocates for a documentary form that is less intellectual reflection and more faith, feeling and craft. A desire for the “real” gives way to intuition or what Robert Burgoyne describes as “affective truth” (2003, 223). Similarly, when Michael Chanan (2008) theorises about the things that are invisible for documentary filmmakers – the overlooked, inaccessible, nonphysical, ignored, edited out, past events, social processes - he reminds us of the power of documentary film to make visible the invisible. While Chanan is specifically interested in showing socio-political processes and power relations, one might add Knudsen’s imagination, Burgoyne’s affection, or quite generally those elements of the human experience that have never been “see-able.”

Contribution

This brings me to what many of us, especially documentary filmmakers, often take for granted: sight. Last Seen: Katie Kelly is a project commissioned by the Queensland Eye. Institute to, quite literally, make visible the last seen moments of ten visually impaired Australians. But how can one use a visual medium to show something that was ultimately never seen? How do we visualise memories? It is here where a conscious shift from documenting, evidencing and capturing to witnessing, imagining and feeling, which animated documentaries inherently embody, is most useful. Notes on Blindness (Spinney and Middleton 2016) expertly uses re-enactments to imagine the experience of visual impairment. For us, knowing that we were part of a project called “last seen,” it was important to focus on memory and ability, rather than the experience of disability, by making “visible” the extraordinary achievements of our protagonist. We felt that using animation techniques would foreground the performative and mediated qualities of memory: how do we “see” in our mind’s eye? How does memory ‘“look”?

Last Seen: Katie Kelly contributes to the field of documentary practice and personal memory, and here specifically to research and practice in animated documentary (Murray and Ehrlich 2020). The film allowed us to use the typical in-depth interview of documentary filmmaking and visualise the oral story through computer-generated animation, witnessing the memories of Katie Kelly OAM PLY and her journey to become Australia's first para-triathlon gold medalist during the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. Gold Coast-based artist Tracie Eaton interpreted Katie’s last seen memory of the Merewether Baths in Newcastle in a unique painting. The animated documentary uses Blender to coalesce Tracie's work and Katie's memory into a cohesive visual narrative.

Significance

Last Seen: Katie Kelly was commissioned by the Queensland Eye Institute as part of a multisensory exhibition and performance that paired ten visually impaired Australians with artists, composers and filmmakers to imagine their last seen moments and visual memories through paintings, music and the moving image. The film was an official selection for Cinema Touching Disability, the International Festival “Reflection on Disability in Art,” the Art Without Limit International Film Festival, as well as AniMate Australia, and nominated for Best “Out of the Ordinary” Diversity & Inclusion Film at the 2023 Port Adelaide Diversity & Inclusion Film Festival.

Last Seen: Katie Kelly challenges audiences to reflect on sight and the central role it plays in our perception of the world, while celebrating human spirit and spirituality. The film is permanently exhibited on lastseen.com.au and, as part of the larger Last Seen project, helped the Queensland Eye Institute Foundation to raise over AUD100,000 for research on eye-related health and diseases.

PEER REVIEW 1

Which aspects of the submission are of interest/relevance and why?

This research statement focuses on a filmmaker’s challenge of how to make “visible” the “invisible” memories of someone who has lost their sight; this is a delightful creative practice research proposition for a documentary filmmaker. This research question is connected to the documentary subject matter and the filmmaker’s choices to use animation to visualise a significant event in the life of Katie Kelly, a Paralympic triathlete. 

In the documentary interview, Katie tells the story of her hearing loss as a child and then her sight loss as an adult, and how the loss of her senses made her eligible to compete as a para-triathlete in the Paralympics in Rio 2016. This short documentary re-tells Katie’s personal journey and her gold medal winning experience in Rio, the challenges of the race and the moment of triumph present a compelling story of human endurance and adversity that led to her athletic career and the joy of achieving a gold medal performance as a triathlete.

While there would have been enormous amounts of archival footage of Katie’s race to be used in the documentary, the filmmaker, in adhering to the larger project brief, drew on an artwork of Katie’s last visual memory, the Mereweather ocean baths in New South Wales, Australia. This painting of Katie's last memory became the primary visual source that set the aesthetic and tone for the animated visualisation of her gold medal win in Rio. The documentary demonstrates how the filmmaking researcher has addressed this brief to “make visible the last seen moments of” a visually impaired Australian. The documentary presents an interview with Katie, as a form of witnessing or testimony of a personal moment that is then consciously shifted to “imagining and feeling” through the animated visuals that overlay her interview.

Does the submission live up to its potential?

The research statement is sound, it presents the research problem and draws in other animated documentary examples to show that this is part of a body of research work for film/documentary. The “Contribution” and “Significance” sections are strong, but the “Research Background,” could be improved. What is missing is an acknowledgment that the testimony– Katie’s edited interview, is the narrative spine of the documentary, and that in some senses dictates what the visuals will be, and how the animations needed to support and extend the spoken word. Pointing out how the narrative was created could link the documentary filmmaker’s skills back to constructing memories or oral histories, a moment of mediation that would also be in line with the performative nature of the animated documentary that is being pursued in the research statement.

How does the submission expose practice as research?

The research statement begins with a background on memory studies scholarship focused on memories being social, localised, and fluid. Next a statement is provided around the animated documentary, “Last Seen: Katie Kelly which explores computer-generated animation as a way to visualise the performativity of memory” (Meissner 2024, para 2). Following the thread of animated actuality and performativity, the research background veers off to present more literature around freeing the documentary form from photographic observations and then presents a loose argument around Chanan’s socio-political processes and power relations, Knudsen’s imagination and Burgoyne’s affection.

What seems to have been overlooked is the authenticity presented through Katie’s testimony, and the spoken word as opposed to footage of the actual para-olympic event (which could have been secured).

The research statement seems to focus on the visualisation of the animation and it does not return at all to how the documentary interview, as an authentic oral recording, was shaped through the edit to present these memories. This seems to be a missed opportunity because the interview, which has been expertly edited, and serves as a testimony of Katie’s experience, has been crafted to draw the viewer into Katie Kelly’s personal and highly emotional memory that is illustrated by the animated imagery. 

The research statement could be re-written to really explore authenticity through the spoken work and this would/should still connect with the idea of “performativity” as part of an animated documentary. 

PEER REVIEW 2

Which aspects of the submission are of interest/relevance and why?

The submission investigates memory studies within the realm of documentary filmmaking, focusing on the journey of Katie Kelly OAM PLY as she achieved Australia's first para-triathlon gold medal at the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. Departing from conventional documentary methods that rely on reenactments or the use of archival footage, the work explores animation as a transformative tool to engage audiences in the narrative. The innovative approach taken to documentary filmmaking advances the practice by seamlessly integrating oral interview techniques with carefully considered and directed computer-generated 3D animation, effectively conveying stories for the screen that are narrated rather than directly observable.

Does the submission live up to its potential?

The potential of this practice as research is fully realised through the authentic portrayal of personal experiences drawn from internal memories of lived but unseen events. It is difficult to identify and suggest how the work could have achieved more. Animation is skillfully employed to highlight and bring performance to Katie’s memory, capturing interest while maintaining a grounded connection to the real-world settings where her achievements unfolded. Rather than pursuing photorealism as a substitute for filmed reality or leaning into exaggerated fantasy to justify the use of animation as the approach for visual storytelling, the work adeptly navigates and finds a nexus between conventional and experimental animation styles. This complements the filmed moments featuring Katie, and reinforces the authenticity of the narrative and the animated visual representations of memory as non-fiction. The creative direction and artist treatment embedded through the work offers audiences a unique and engaging experience which is distinct from conventional live-action performances.

How does the submission expose practice as research?

The submission exposes practice as research by visualising internal memory through the practice of animated documentary filmmaking. The work poses fundamental questions about the capability of visual art techniques to portray unseen memories, and how animation techniques can be used to accentuate the performative and mediated aspects of memory. These inquiries are particularly evident in the work and are reinforced through Katie’s narrative, which serves as a poignant case study.

The practices employed throughout this project contribute to the advancement of memory studies and documentary filmmaking through the use of stylised computer-generated 3D animation to effectively convey real-life stories that defy direct visualisation or filming. The practice on display should challenge fellow researchers and screen practitioners to rethink traditional documentary approaches, and further should serve as an example to animators seeking to engage in the impactful visualisation of stories, be they imagined or reflections of reality. By enhancing audience capacity to engage with narratives that are either too emotionally charged to revisit or impossible to represent via photography, the practice employed by the author underscores the transformative potential of animation in human storytelling.

The practice not only narrates Katie Kelly's remarkable journey but also pushes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking by exploiting the characteristics of animation to enhance narrative depth and emotional resonance. The practice is a testament to the power of interdisciplinary approaches in capturing and conveying the essence of human memories and experiences.

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEW

I would like to thank the two reviewers for taking the time to engage with the work. Their shared insights ultimately helped to enrich my thought process. In the original research statement, I performed a rather rapid mental leap by solely focusing on the animated aspects of the creative practice while more or less omitting the interview as a pivotal element of the work. I have attempted to address this in the revised research statement below, while maintaining its focus on animated documentary (where in my view the main contribution to knowledge is located) and therefore the visual “half” of the creative work.

REVISED RESEARCH STATEMENT

Background

In memory studies, memories are described as performances of the past that require a medium to be transmitted into the presence (Plate and Smelik 2013). While highly personal, memories are socially constructed, or as Maurice Halbwachs holds: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localise their memories” (1992, 38). And this construction is “fluid and flexible,” as memories are “conceptualised as something that does not stay put but circulates, migrates, travels; it is more and more perceived as a process, as work that is continually in progress, rather than as a reified object” (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen 2016, 1).

I am a documentary filmmaker. That is, I am interested in real people's experiences and memories. To me, documentary filmmaking is relational much more than empirical. It is performative, just like the memories it attempts to capture. And so, Last Seen: Katie Kelly explores computer-generated animation as a way to visualise the performativity of memory.

Documentary film is a visual medium that, most often, tells stories about the past – stories that can no longer be seen but only retold. While interviews offer a socially constructed access into people’s past, archival footage, re-enactments and more poetic modes have been used to overcome challenges of visualising memory. Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) is possibly still the most widely known example of a fully animated documentary film. It uses animation to visualise a past that has little archival footage and memories that are half forgotten and filled with trauma. Similarly, in Everything’s For You (Ravett 1989), filmmaker Abraham Ravett uses animated sequences to visualise events that he cannot fully comprehend (Ravett 2011). Animation foregrounds the performativity of memory. It can bridge the empirical world of historic events, people and places, explored through the spoken word of the interview, with the internal world of memories, thoughts and emotions. Therefore, animated documentaries might add “something” to the viewing experience or at least change the way audiences engage with the subject matter. They might, as Andy Glynne suggests, liberate documentary “from its traditional prison-house of photographic observationalism” by playing witness to personal memories rather than attempting to evidence them (2013, 73).

Animation does not claim authenticity as much as live action film does. While the photographic image captures reality and makes it immortal (Doane 2007), animation frees itself from this responsibility, thereby allowing the performative element of imagining coming to the fore. It offers the chance to “escape from the indexical qualities inherent in film” (Gageldonk et al. 2020, 2) and “broadens the limits of what and how we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of seeing” (Honess Roe 2013, 2).

The interview, as a traditional documentary filmmaking tool, grounds this imagination into a socially constructed account of actuality between protagonist and filmmaker. It builds an oral history foundation to the performative visualisation. If memories are performances of the past that require a medium to travel into the present, the interview remains the filmmaker’s initial medium by traversing along pivotal moments of the protagonist’s life, while computer animated visualisation becomes a secondary medium of the filmmaker’s interpretation and imagination of their protagonist’s memory. Contrasting the two, so is my hope, can highlight the performative nature of memory in documentary filmmaking.

Rather than having to seek the rational and satisfy a historical need to “document” through the image, animated documentary affords the filmmaker to be just a little more intuitive – manifesting a world on screen that never existed off it, for memories that had never been seen and can therefore simply travel from the imagination of one individual (the protagonist) to that of another (the filmmaker). I believe this is what Erik Knudsen (2008) calls for when he advocates for a documentary form that is less intellectual reflection and more faith, feeling and craft. A desire for the “real” gives way to intuition or what Robert Burgoyne (2003, 223) describes as “affective truth.” Similarly, when Michael Chanan (2008) theorises about the things that are invisible for documentary filmmakers - the overlooked, inaccessible, nonphysical, ignored, edited out, past events, social processes - he reminds us of the power of documentary film to make visible the invisible. While Chanan is specifically interested in showing socio-political processes and power relations, one might add Knudsen’s imagination, Burgoyne’s affection, or quite generally those elements of the human experience that have never been “see-able.”

Contribution

This brings me to what many of us, especially documentary filmmakers, often take for granted: sight. Last Seen: Katie Kelly is a project commissioned by the Queensland Eye Institute to, quite literally, make visible the last seen moments of ten visually impaired Australians. But how can one use a visual medium to show something that was ultimately never seen? How do we visualise memories? It is here where a conscious shift from documenting, evidencing and capturing to witnessing, imagining and feeling, which animated documentaries inherently embody, is most useful. Notes on Blindness (Spinney and Middleton 2016) expertly uses re-enactments to imagine the experience of visual impairment. For us, knowing that we were part of a project called “last seen,” it was important to focus on memory and ability, rather than the experience of disability, by making “visible” the extraordinary achievements of our protagonist. We felt that using animation techniques would foreground the performative and mediated qualities of memory: How do we “see” in our mind’s eye? How does memory “look”?

Last Seen: Katie Kelly contributes to the field of documentary practice and personal memory, and here specifically to research and practice in animated documentary (Murray and Ehrlich 2020). The film allowed us to use the typical in-depth interview of documentary filmmaking and visualise the oral story through computer-generated animation, witnessing the memories of Katie Kelly OAM PLY and her journey to become Australia's first para-triathlon gold medalist during the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. Gold Coast-based artist Tracie Eaton interpreted Katie’s last seen memory of the Merewether Baths in Newcastle in a unique painting. The documentary uses 3D computer animation to coalesce Tracie's work and Katie's memory into a cohesive visual narrative.

Significance

Last Seen: Katie Kelly was commissioned by the Queensland Eye Institute as part of a multisensory exhibition and performance that paired ten visually impaired Australians with artists, composers and filmmakers to imagine their last seen moments and visual memories through paintings, music and the moving image. The film was an official selection for Cinema Touching Disability, the International Festival “Reflection on Disability in Art,” the Art Without Limit International Film Festival, as well as AniMate Australia, and nominated for Best “Out of the Ordinary” Diversity & Inclusion Film at the 2023 Port Adelaide Diversity & Inclusion Film Festival.

Last Seen: Katie Kelly challenges audiences to reflect on sight and the central role it plays in our perception of the world, while celebrating human spirit and spirituality. The film is permanently exhibited on lastseen.com.au and, as part of the larger Last Seen project, helped the Queensland Eye Institute Foundation raise over AUD100,000 for research on eye-related health and diseases.

REFERENCES

Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen. 2016. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. New York: Berghahn Books.

Burgoyne, Robert. 2003. “Memory, History and Digital Imagery.” In Memory and Popular Film, edited by Paul Grainge, 220–236. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Chanan, Michael. 2008. “Filming 'the Invisible’.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, edited by Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong, 121-132. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.

Doane, Mary Ann. 2007. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” Differences 18, no. 1: 128–152. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-025.

Folman, Ari, dir. 2008. Waltz With Bashir. Jerusalem: Sony Picture Classics.

Gageldonk, Maarten van, László Munteán, and Ali Shobeiri. 2020. Animation and Memory. Palgrave Animation. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glynne, Andy. 2013. “Drawn From Life: The Animated Documentary.” In The Documentary Film Book edited by Brian Winston, 73-75. London: BFI.

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Edited by Lewis A Coser. The Heritage of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Knudsen, Erik. 2008. “Transcendental realism in documentary.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, edited by Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong, 108-120. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.

Murray, Jonathan, Nea Ehrlich, eds. 2020. Drawn From Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik. 2013. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

Ravett, Abraham, dir. 1989. Everything’s For You. New York: The Film-makers’ Coop.

Ravett, Abraham. 2011. “Everything’s For You: Reflections on Animating a ‘Fierce and Inexorable Bond’.” Animation 6, no. 3: 325–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847711416610.

Spinney, James, and Peter Middleton, dir. 2016. Notes on Blindness. London: Curzon Artificial Eye.