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Harold Moss is the founder and creative director at FlickerLab and Moss—based in New York—which worked on two movies that are grabbing headlines of late: The Reckoning was selected to the Documentary competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and Trouble the Water got an Oscar nomination this year for Best Documentary. For more on Moss, visit FlickerLab’s Reel-Exchange profile.

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CE: Congratulations on a big month for FlickerLab. Reflect on these honors and how your animation/design company got involved with these documentaries?

HM: My background is in studying Documentary Film at Ithaca College, and though I ended up doing a lot of work in commercial animation and motion graphics through FlickerLab, I have always kept a strong relationship with the documentary community. I consider this work an act of service, fundamentally, bringing the expertise and resources I've developed in the commercial world to bear in helping offer a level of graphic clarity to important documentary films. I've had the tremendous fortune of working on some truly great documentaries through the years, and this past year was particularly strong on that front, including work on Sundance winner and current Oscar Nominee Trouble the Water and Sundance selections The Reckoning and Glass House. We also completed graphic and effects work on Sicko the year before.

This relationship to documentaries has been extended and re-affirmed with the birth of MOSS, a new company label I've launched with my partner, Tammy Walters, focusing on media at the intersection of the environment and social justice. We are honored to have been involved with these incredible films dealing with questions of social change and justice—each in their own way.

I originally met Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the directors of Trouble the Water, while working with Michael Moore on the Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. They were producers on the film and I created the three minute cartoon in the film, "A Brief History of the US." Tia and Carl are two of the most talented and compassionate filmmakers (and people) I have ever met, and when they went down to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, I knew something special would come of it.

What they ended up with was much more than a documentary about a disaster. It's an incredible movie with some of the most compelling characters I've seen on screen in any genre, that nails you to your seat, while raising some very deep questions about our nation. While I ended up with the title of Consulting Producer, I'd say my true title should be Enthusiastic Friend. I tried to be of service in whatever way I could as the film came along, from lending them my camera on their first trip, to watching the film with them as it evolved and giving feedback, lots of cheerleading and encouragement, and offering whatever post and graphics advice I could throughout the process. In the end, I stepped in to help out with the graphic design and animation.

CE:Both of these films were documentaries. First, for Trouble the Water—Grand Jury winner for Best Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and now Oscar nominated—what was your participation and what were the challenges?

HM: Trouble the Water moves back and forward in time and place, so the graphics play an important in keeping the viewer rooted in the story. But visually, the brief was for the graphics to be fairly transparent to the viewer. The information needed to get through without calling too much attention to it, without pulling the viewer out of the story. This poses a very different set of challenges than the typical commercial or broadcast graphics job, in which you are throwing in everything plus the kitchen sink (often a very shiny kitchen sink) screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" In a context like this, it's about subtleties. Tia and Carl wanted an elegant solution that helped knit the film together, and helped add to the cinematic scope of this already epic film, without undo distraction. The animation is all about slight tracking, slow zooming, and careful typesetting.

In addition, there was a certain amount of workhorse compositing and effects, cleaning up low quality broadcast video graphics and so on. You know you've done your job on these kinds of shots if no one even notices you've done anything.

We did stretch out design-wise in a couple of places during the film, particularly one sequence in which a litany of damning statistics presents the criminally neglected state in which most of New Orleans has been left. Here I emulated lines of police tape strung across the scene of the crime scene that is New Orleans, post-Katrina. We also used the simple drama of the open title and dramatic vignetting/framing to give the lower resolution video of the opening shots of the film cinematic heft.

I've been working with Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís of Skylight Pictures, the makers of the Sundance selected documentary The Reckoning, for over ten years, creating graphics for many of their documentary projects. They too rank amongst the most passionate and dedicated individuals I have known. There's clearly something about social justice documentary film makers. Skylight Pictures has a long history of creating hard hitting docs with gripping stories. But their films don't just affect an audience, they affect real change in the world, and I think The Reckoning, a multi-continent, decade, and conflict spanning look at the International Criminal Court, is set to be their most impact-full work yet. It's easy to feel helpless in the face of genocide, government repression, and crimes against humanity around the world. But the International Criminal Court is boldly and patiently working to bring the rule of law and justice to victims in all corners of the globe. The Reckoning plays like an edge-of-the-seat thriller, looking at the twin dramas of the struggle of the court in establishing and carrying out this mission and the procedural drama of the prosecution of these unspeakable crimes itself.

Given the thriller and procedural character of the story, we went in a somewhat more stylized direction. Our base font was Vinyl, a slightly distressed, though still elegant san serif font from the font house T26. This film takes even greater leaps in space, from New York to the Hague, from the Congo to Columbia. We created strongly graphic chapter headings, utilizing treated footage and world maps to both reflect thriller feel and to let the audience know where they are in the story. We also completed a wider range of effects and compositing work on a range of shots, re-compositing footage in monitors and so forth. But again, the hallmark of such work is its complete invisibility.

We also played a smaller role, but were just as pleased to be associated with, The Glass House, a documentary by Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard that follows the stories of several amazing young women in Tehran in a very center dedicated to helping girls overcome abuse and lead healthy lives. It was also at Sundance this year. Hamid is a very talented designer, and did most of the graphics work himself.

We depend on the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) and Macs (G5 Quads) for all our motion graphic and effects work, and edit on our end in Apple's Final Cut (6.0.5). The bulk of the design is done in Photoshop and Illustrator, with the compositing done in After Effects. It's a powerful and flexible toolset that lets us carry out all design, compositing and effects work within a desktop environment, regardless of the resolution and media we're working with.

Both Trouble the Water and The Reckoning incorporated footage from a wide range of sources and qualities, from old VHS tapes and 8mm video, to 16 mm film and digital HD. Adobe handles all of them with ease. The new frame blending in After Effects that actually morphs in-betweens for slowed down footage, has become an absolute must in working with footage for graphic applications.

CE: As you know, documentary filmmaking has changed graphically and visually in the past decade or two. What insight do you have on creating successful documentary stories—and how including creative graphics and effects into such docs helps the overall story and viewer-experience?

HM: We've definitely been part of the shift in documentary storytelling. Just as Michael Moore's Roger and Me opened up new vistas for serious documentary storytelling as mass entertainment, his use of animation in Bowling for Columbine opened up the use of new media forms for many film makers. After Bowling came out, we developed the reputation for being the studio that does cartoons for docs, and have been personally involved in doing a number of them since, including one film now that features about 8 minutes of cartoons. We also keep looking for the opportunity to make more fully animated documentaries.

Graphics can play such different roles in documentaries, depending on the nature of the storytelling. Often, as in Trouble the Water, the graphics move to the background. They are the good children of the film, as such, seen but not heard. Whether in these cases, or when the graphics declare themselves more vividly, graphics need to be seen as part of the storytelling of the film, just as much as the score, the cinematography, or the editing. How are they intended to make you feel? Confident in the facts presented in a chart? Nervous at what's coming next in a chapter heading? Excited at the turn in the story? Do they help you laugh at something absurd? This is more obviously true when things break out into full cartoon style animation, but it's also true of the subtle art of the lower third and the chapter heading.

Documentaries are movies. Documentary makers should feel free to unleash all of cinema's tools to get their film and their message across. Some stories call for restraint, Helvetica, no transitions but cuts, and just the facts, ma-am. Others call for graphic adventurism, with cartoon characters, graffiti style graphics, bouncing type, and killer stop-motion robots running amuck. The key is to know your story and to stay true to it.

That's really the key to making great docs in general. You need to have a story you are passionate about telling. The tough part is you might not know what that story is when you start out. But you have to find it. And you have to fight for it, and feel that getting that story out is the most important thing you have to do. There are so many stories like that in the world.

One thing I hope people are coming to realize is that the best documentaries are some of the best movies, period. We have somehow been lead to believe that narrative films are more entertaining. That, to be blunt, is complete crap. These films all have incredibly gripping stories, are intensely emotionally affecting, and have characters that will stay with you for years. How many big budget films coming out of Hollywood can claim half so much? On top of that, these are real! If you want to see some of the best films being made, check out docs like these.

At MOSS, we're also looking forward to many more great films from these directors, as well as to the possibility of starting to produce films of our own, with a focus on the environmental and social justice issues we think are so critical.

Staffing for Moss for Trouble the Water and The Reckoning

Trouble the Water
Design and Animation: Harold Moss
Executive Producer: Franklin Zitter

The Reckoning
Design: Harold Moss and Paul Beaudry
Compositing and Animation: Bryan Cox, Paul Beaudry, and Harold Moss
Executive Producer: Franklin Zitter