Share
AnimatedDocumentary
Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks
Rosie Schellenberg is a director with over twenty years of experience making award-winning films and television programmes. Her latest film, Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks, broadcasts on Wednesday 19th November 2025 at 21:00 on BBC Two. This stunning biographic documentary, looking at the life of the pioneering painter J.M.W. Turner, includes numerous animated sequences created by animation duo Tjoff Koong (Tezo Kyungdon Lee and Magnus Lenneskog) at Passion Pictures. These animations both reconstruct Turner’s historical environment and evoke his inner experience. The animation in this documentary is sensitive, imaginative and powerful, and is essential to the film’s creative essence. We spoke to Rosie about the process of making the film, and what animation can bring to documentary storytelling.
Find more animated documentary content at www.animateddocs.com
More episodes
View all episodes
3. Collaborative cycles: an interview with Samantha Moore
25:34||Season 1, Ep. 3Carla MacKinnon talks to animated documentary filmmaker and researcher Samantha Moore about her creative background, her collaborative filmmaking methodology, and her BAFTA-nominted short film Visible Mending (2023).
2. Explorations in time and space: an interview with Tess Martin
26:20||Season 1, Ep. 2Carla MacKinnon talks to artist, animator and filmmaker Tess Martin about her recent animated documentary projects How Now House (2025) and 1976 Search For Life (2022), her creative exploration of forms and materials, her love of Clio Barnard's The Arbour (2010), and the impact of new technologies on animated documentary production and commissioning.
1. Ryan and Alter Egos
36:11||Season 1, Ep. 1Animators Alys Scott-Hawkins, Carla MacKinnon, and Alex Widdowson discuss their thoughts on Chris Landreth's seminal short animated documentary Ryan (2004) and Laurence Green's film Alter Egos, a live-action making-of documentary released the same year, which tracks Landreth's filmmaking process and exposes problematic elements in his approach.