Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London (UK). Alexander Sergeant is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at the University of Westminster (UK), specialising in the history and theory of fantasy cinema. Each episode, they look in detail at a film or television show, taking listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation.
Episodes
Monday Oct 27, 2025
Monday Oct 27, 2025
Inspired by the recent podcast episode on Casper (Brad Silberling, 1995) that featured a conversation with the film’s lead animator Mark Austin, Chris and Alex maintain the Halloween theme for this latest Footnote instalment that examines the spectacular imagery of “pepper’s ghost” - an illusion technique dating back to the earliest forms of stage magic that also found a home across multiple popular entertainment spaces and attractions. Topics include the origins of John Henry Pepper’s ghostly apparitions and the ‘trick’ mechanics of theatrical display; the techniques involved in the illusory creation of three-dimensional objects and the broader seduction of holographic effects; how and where the ‘live’ interactions between physical performers and transparent spectral figurations on stage moved into early silent cinema; and possible links between pepper’s ghost as a technique of illusion and contemporary digital holography (including ABBA Voyage [2022-]).
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
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