Persistence of vision: how does animation work?

A zoetropeA sequence of images printed on a spinning drum or disk provide the illusion of continuous motion when viewed through a slot in the drum or on a secondary moving disk. The slot acts as a shutter momentarily freezing the image. A traditional cinema projector works on the same illusion by actually stopping the film frames.Understanding persistence of vision helps animators to create smooth and lifelike animations in the most efficient way by showing the viewer just enough frames to create the sense of motion. In animation, moving characters are often shot “on twos”, which means one image is shown for every two frames of film, a total of 12 drawings per second. Although this is just on the limit of our ‘persistence of vision’ it is usually satisfactory for creating smooth and lifelike animation.

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