A classic animation technique allowed the team behind Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story to get creative when it came to making a documentary about the late soul singer.

The feature documentary is written and directed by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, and made its world premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 9. It tells the story of Shane, a Black transgender woman from Nashville who rose in prominence as a singer in the 1960s before vanishing from the spotlight.

The film – produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Toronto’s Banger Films in association with Bell Media – came together through many phone conversations between Mabbott and Shane, as well as interviews with the artist’s family. However, a lack of filmed footage of Shane created a challenge for providing visuals.

Mabbott and the production team had a creative solution: using the technique of rotoscoping, which creates a realistic animation by tracing over live-action scenes, frame by frame.

To achieve this, the team hired Luca Tarantini and Jared Raab as director and co-director of animation, and worked “hand in hand with them,” Burt tells Playback Daily. They brought in U.S. actor Sandra Caldwell to portray Shane in the phone recordings and trans advocate Makayla Walker to play the artist as a performer in the rotoscoped scenes.

This storytelling style would turn out to be a pull for Bell Media, which pre-bought Canadian broadcast rights for the doc in 2021. (NFB holds Canadian distribution rights, excluding TV broadcast.)

“Compelling and unique documentaries are popular with Crave subscribers, and we’re always looking to amplify diverse stories and content that reflects our viewers, so when Banger Films came to us with Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story in 2021, we knew we had to be a part of it. It’s not only the subject matter, but the unique approach to storytelling techniques, like rotoscope animation, that drew us to the documentary,” says Justin Stockman, VP, content development and programming at Bell Media. The doc is slated to premiere on Crave later this year.

Mabbott says his first exposure to Shane’s music was around 2012 when he heard the album Jackie Shane Live!

That moment set the wheels in motion for a nearly six-year effort to make contact with the singer. Finally, in 2018, Mabbott contacted the singer over the phone with the help of music writer Rob Bowman, who had been writing liner notes for her Grammy-nominated box set Any Other Way (2017). They would continue to connect by phone for more than a year. The longest call lasted some 11 hours, according to Mabbott.

“It was intense and emotional. Some of my friends, family and colleagues thought I was mad to keep going without knowing whether she was going to agree to make this film,” he recalls.

Mabbott says the length of the conversations was intentional on Shane’s part, who wanted to see if the filmmaker was committed to telling her story properly. He says he kept going not only because he really wanted to make the film but also because “her story involved erasure and was at risk of being forgotten.”

Banger Films’ Amanda Burt says Mabbott approached her about producing a documentary after Shane died in February 2019. They came on board the same year, and development on the project began.

When they were initially seeking financing, Burt says they were either told that the project was “too niche” or that telling a story about an unknown trans singer, without much material on her other than her music, “just wouldn’t fly as a doc.”

In 2020, they took the project to NFB, where Pimlott had gone through her own process of trying to track down Shane in 2017 and connected with her the following year in the hopes of making a documentary.

“I felt like that was fate … Jackie was putting us together, because when I talked to her, she would say, ‘yeah, there’s this other filmmaker, and I really like him and I really like you and, too bad you can’t work together.’ And it turns out, obviously, it was Michael,” says Pimlott.

Executive producer Martin Katz of Toronto-based Prospero Pictures was instrumental in linking the team with Pageboy Productions, led by Halifax-born actor, producer and trans activist Elliot Page, which came on board around the same time.

“We were really pushing up against funders and partners trying to figure out ‘how do we actually get this made?’ And we were looking to partner with someone who could really amplify what we were doing,” says Burt.

Production began in August 2022, with filming largely taking place in Nashville, and wrapped in June 2023 with the rotoscope shoots that took place in Toronto.

The financing for the project was finalized a few months into shooting. Funders include Telefilm Canada, Canada Media Fund, Bell Media, Ontario Creates and the Rogers Documentary Fund.

“There’s a ceiling for how much money you can get for a documentary in Canada. And we definitely hit that ceiling,” says Burt, adding that the total budget landed slightly above $2 million.

Financing was one challenge, the other was navigating the “labyrinth” of music rights.

“There’s usually an infrastructure behind all these artists, agents, managers, labels, publishers, the artists themselves, we didn’t have any of that,” says Burt.

Instead the team had the trust of Shane’s family, who didn’t know that she existed until they were told they had inherited her belongings. Among the items the family inherited were unreleased recordings that have become part of the film, a hand-written autobiography, photos and other items Burt describes as “treasures.”

“For us to be able to see what Jackie left behind and those clues … they came together to make the film that we have today.”

Producers on Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story include Burt, Sam Dunn and Scott McFadyen for Banger, Pimlott for the NFB, and Mabbott. Dunn and McFadyen are also executive producers alongside the NFB’s Chanda Chevannes, Anita Lee, Pageboy Productions’ Page and Matt Jordan, Prospero Pictures’ Katz, Nia Long, and CJ Mac.

Image courtesy of Banger Films and the NFB