I’m fascinated by the use of animation in documentaries to provide visuals when no footage is available. The Hulu series Sasquatch opens with an animated story sequence that is dark, moody, and relatively low budget. Done with hand drawn elements and After Effects (I presume). I can’t link to the animation itself, but here’s the trailer, with a couple quick shots of the animation. https://youtu.be/G8pVypMhub8
Animation : Documentary animation by Mike Boas
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That's super cool, Mike Boas! I find this subject interesting too. Related, have you seen the documentary TOWER by Keith Maitland? It goes into the mass shooting at UT Tower in 1966 and reenacts a lot of it through rotoscoped animation. I was so impressed with how effective it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k963PfUVeLQ
I love me some good ol Sasquatch. Mike, from the trailer it seems like it limited motion, more storyboards and as you said, cut out and animated in AE for basic motion. Very effective and least time-consuming.
I love the animation in the 2020 Belushi documentary for showtime. there's an interview with Robery Valley here and if you skip to the 14 minute mark you start to see some of the look they went with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnzwzzjbnGk
I just got through doing dome animation for a documentary about a radio personality where excerpts from comedy sketches had an animated character listening and reacting to them. It was fun and the director had a great sense how it could help the tone of the film.
Robert Valley is an interesting guy. I've watched a few of his talks and interviews, including that one about Belushi. Still haven't seen that doc yet!
The opening five minutes of Sasquatch is almost entirely animated. Yes, it's limited animation, but the perfect choice for illustrating the story we hear in narration. And there's a lot of tricks to keep things interesting. Layers of rain, camera moves with parallax, puppet pinning for waving tree branches. I'll be showing that segment to my After Effects students this fall.
Looks interesting, I have to check it out