People We Know is an on-going documentary animation film project, in which animation students record and document aspects of the lives of a local community to create minute-long participatory animated documentaries.

The project was designed to investigate:

• The effectiveness of the animated documentary in developing student discernment in identifying and creating original character designs and narratives for the animation filmmaking process.

• The impact and benefits of the documentary filmmaking process in student engagement and involvement with local communities. The project encourages students to move away from the intrinsically introspective process of animation to a more outward focused process of documentary making. By placing real people as the starting point and centre of the study, the project was designed to allow students to get a deeper understanding of the subject of character design, and thereby create believable characters and convincing narratives. The project has included collaborations with researchers in the subject area of Community Psychology to study the impact of the project on communities and feedback from each project has informed and improved its subsequent iteration. The project can be scaled to suit any group of animation students in building and fostering relationships within their local communities, while learning how to create original work simultaneously.

• The outputs of this project; a selection of 20 animation films and an accompanying paper that offers the context of the study, have been disseminated in international conferences such as Animafest Scanner Zagreb.