HerStory Lessons was a six-episode animated documentary series created for ABC News and Good Morning America during Women’s History Month 2020. Each approximately 10-minute episode explored the life and legacy of a woman who had made a lasting impact on American history.

Animwood partnered with ABC News correspondent Deborah Roberts and handled the animation production from visual development and styleframes through storyboards, illustration, character design, animation, and final delivery.

The series combined documentary storytelling with 2D animation, archival materials, typography, and mixed-media techniques. The result was an editorial animation format that could communicate real historical events while giving the filmmakers creative freedom.

During Women’s History Month 2020, Animwood partnered with ABC News and its Good Morning America broadcasting segment to create a six-episode animated documentary series.

The episodes focused on Dolores Huerta, Judith Heumann, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Dorothy Irene Height, Anuradha Bhagwati, and Heather “Lucky” Penney. Each story required a different visual approach while remaining part of one recognizable editorial series.

Animwood was responsible for the full animation production, including visual development, styleframes, storyboards, illustration, character design, animation, and compositing. The production combined 2D character animation with archival photography, recorded footage, typography, and other documentary materials.

One of the episodes tells the story of Heather “Lucky” Penney, a U.S. Air Force pilot whose experiences during the September 11 attacks became part of the story. For this episode, the visual direction was developed around the atmosphere of the early 2000s, helping place the audience within the period being discussed.

The project demonstrates how animated biographies can work alongside traditional documentary footage rather than replacing it. Animation can become an additional visual layer that helps filmmakers move between interviews, archive material, historical events, and personal memories. 

The central goal of HerStory was to bring inspiring stories of American women to a broad audience while making their historical achievements accessible through visual storytelling.

Because the series was created for a major broadcast audience, the animation needed to support the editorial narrative - every visual decision was therefore connected to the person, period, and story being presented.

The challenge was also to make six individual biographies feel like parts of one recognizable series. Each episode needed its own visual identity while maintaining enough consistency to work within the ABC News editorial format.

Animation made it possible to approach sensitive and complex stories with a combination of factual references and more expressive visual storytelling. Symbolic imagery, transitions, typography, character animation, and mixed-media compositions could communicate ideas that would be difficult to capture with conventional footage alone.

This approach is particularly useful for documentaries and social impact projects where the audience needs to understand both what happened and why it matters.

One of the key visual challenges was creating a distinct look and feel for the different periods represented across the series. For the Heather “Lucky” Penney episode, the story centered on events connected to the early 2000s. Rather than using one generic animation style, we developed the visual language around the period itself. A toned-down, modern color palette helped establish the atmosphere of the early 2000s. Flat-design characters were combined with period-specific clothing, typography, graphic elements, and news-inspired visual treatments.

Interview sections incorporated elements inspired by broadcast news graphics, helping the animated sequences connect naturally with the documentary structure. Visual references, typography, color, objects, environments, and graphic conventions all contribute to making a period recognizable.

The result was an animation style that supported the historical context while still feeling contemporary enough for a modern broadcast audience.

One of the main advantages of animation in documentary filmmaking is its ability to visualize material that cannot be filmed today.

For HerStory, animation allowed archival photographs, recorded footage, interviews, and other existing materials to become part of a moving visual narrative. It also gave the production team a way to reconstruct events for which no camera footage existed.

This is particularly valuable for animated biographies and historical documentaries. A photograph can establish what a person looked like, but animation can place that person within an environment, recreate a moment, or connect different pieces of archival material into one continuous sequence.

Voice-over narration and interview recordings also opened the door to more metaphorical and symbolic imagery. Personal memories and subjective experiences could be represented through animation without pretending that the animated reconstruction was original documentary footage. The result is a flexible visual language that can move between factual information, archival material, historical reconstruction, and emotional storytelling.

This is one of the reasons animation has become such a useful tool for documentary filmmakers, broadcasters, and production companies. It can fill visual gaps while remaining closely connected to the source material.

If you are a producer, broadcaster, filmmaker, production company, or nonprofit developing a documentary that needs animation, Animwood can support the project from visual development and storyboarding through illustration, animation, compositing, and final delivery.

Contact our production team at:

newbusiness@animwood.com