RSS
Home
Nuts n' Bolts: Persistence of Vision
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.jpg)
A zoetrope, an early device which demonstrated Peristence of Vision.
Nuts n’ Bolts Introduction:
Animation -- like any other technical pursuit -- has its own nomenclature and lore. For those interested in simply watching and enjoying the films, this minutia can (and should) be ignored. Anyone wanting to dig deeper, however, can quickly find themselves mired in jargon. Thus it is that we now begin a new series of columns under the clever umbrella title of Nuts n’ Bolts. Each entry will take a single item related to animation -- be it a technical term, a piece of industry-specific technology, or a particular technique -- and succinctly define it.
Look at Nuts n’ Bolts as a glossary developed and presented in slow-motion.
Persistence of Vision:
Movies are made possible thanks to a quirk of human physiology. When the eye sees something, it maintains a momentary record of the image. Because of this fact, if a person is shown a series of incrementally different still pictures, his eyes will convince his brain that he is seeing continuous motion. This phenomenon is called “Persistence of Vision”, and it was discovered in 1824 by Peter Mark Roget -- the very same man who gave us the thesaurus.
Built on the foundation of Persistence of Vision, modern movies achieve the illusion of continuous motion by displaying twenty-four still pictures every second. Each one of these pictures is referred to as a frame. In live action filmmaking, cameras capable of capturing imagery at this rate of speed are pointed at real people and movies are made more or less in real time. Animated films don’t have it quite so easy. Although cartoons are also projected at twenty-four frames per second, pointing a camera at Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny is, sadly, impossible. In animation, every frame has to be drawn individually and then photographed onto motion picture film one frame at a time. That’s 24 pictures every second, 1440 pictures every minute, and 86,400 pictures every hour. But these numbers are misleading since they don’t account for the background drawings or the additional characters which may be onscreen at the same time. Typically, different characters are animated by different men and then married together at the photography stage.
Persistence of Vision is what makes animation a viable (albeit an incredibly laborious) undertaking.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
