‘Feel Everything’: Animation, Advertising and Affect in Cinema and Television Idents

During periods of economic threat or existential crisis cinema has turned to spectacle to highlight its unique qualities as a form of entertainment. Part of cinema’s allure is the promise of an experience that you cannot enjoy at home and recent animated idents highlight the spectacular affective qualities of Sony 4K and Dolby Digital technology particular to the multiplex. This is not only limited to the cinema theatre with related promotional strategies predicated on notions of intersensory correspondence and technological developments increasingly drawn on by the television industry in an era of increased competition for viewers. In 2006 VFX studio The Mill produced a series of short animated trailers as part of the Sky HD launch campaign under the tagline ‘Feel Everything’, which were screened in both cinemas and on television. This tagline highlights an intention to touch the audience on a corporeal level, to offer them a whole-body experience that actively engages their sensorium. Innovations in sound and image technology such as Dolby Digital and 4K image resolution, both in the cinema and the home, have affected the way audiences comprehend the hierarchy between music/sound and image, allowing for an ambiguity between what audiovisual information they perceive and how they perceive it. The Mill suggests that the animation for the Sky campaign ‘was looking so fantastic with details you felt you could reach out and touch’. Yet they also remind us that this potential to feel the image through the eyes and ears of the audience was nonetheless an advertisement for the spectacle of what this new technology could provide. This chapter contends that these idents are employing hyperreal audiovisual aesthetics premised on the ability of technological advances and intersensory correspondence to physically touch audiences in order to advertise the unique affective
qualities of cinema and increasingly television.