Franchise Aesthetics: Looking at Hybrid Live-Action/Animated Images

Franchise Aesthetics: Looking at Hybrid Live-Action/Animated Images explores the connections between hybrid imagery - defined as combinations of live-action imagery and animation techniques, recorded images and process of digital manipulation - and the media-epistemological formations that inform everyday life amidst the ever-intensifying use of hybrid techniques throughout visual culture. I examine a range of hybrid procedures from the perspective of their impact on our mediated engagement with the past, our spatial and temporal experience, and the ways we envision the future. This perspective significantly extends existing ways of thinking about hybrid imagery and addresses the urgent problem of how to account for hybrid processes as they become increasingly ubiquitous, yet increasingly invisible.

Chapter one argues that digital colourisation can be implicated in the re-shaping of our access to the past, as exemplified by Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Investigating hologram effects in science-fiction texts such as Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), chapter two positions digital compositing as inculcating a new logic of onscreen space which impacts our psychophysiological experience of space. Chapter three examines the ways in which digitally manipulated durations - such as the impossibly extended takes of recent action cinema - have a temporalising effect that informs our experience of passing time. Chapter four investigates computer-animation's incorporation of the epistemological routines of analogue media and puts texts like the LEGO Movie franchise (2014-) in a quasi-causal chain with the material culture of tomorrow.

Unifying these themes of time and space, past and future, my concept of franchise aesthetics highlights the instrumental qualities of hybrid images within an hyper-financialised capital-intensive visual culture. Hybrid techniques prefigure, catalyse and normalise the ongoing reconstitution of subjective experience within, and on behalf of, digital capitalism. Offering a critique of the instrumental qualities of hybridity, franchise aesthetics aims to illuminate and inhibit the degree to which hybrid images intersect with and over-determine the structures of feeling that are characteristic of contemporary experience.