Research – 11th January 2017
The persistence of the eye is an illusion . An average human is thought to see an image for one 25th of a second after it disappears. This means it creates an illusion that the image is still being played for 25th of a second after its stopped being shown on the screen. The image will no longer be there but your eyes see otherwise.
In another blog I spoke about the mind being tricked and the brain thinking anything over 16fps is a moving image . Well, anything below 16fps the mind sees a flashing image. So if an animation was made with under 16fps the brain would see the image for a quarter of a second longer than its being displayed for which then creates a jumpy stop motion animation.
Morph, a famous stop motion animation is a modern TV series that uses the clay-mation technique and shoots at 30fps. The method is seamless and no flashing images can be seen. The frame rate is so high, the persistence of the eye illusion simply does not work. The brain is fooled and believes this is just a moving image.
However, The Horse in Motion, one of the earliest stop motion animations, is created using under 16fps and this is where the illusion works. You can see the jumping/jolting within the animation. The technology back then was not like it is today and therefore 30fps just sounded ridiculous. When watching the flashing images are clearly noticeable.
Hannah Silvester 