The Early Days
Persistence of vision was discovered in the early 1800's. Our eye and brain retain a visual impression for about 1/30th of a second. Persistence of vision prevents us from noticing that a motion picture screen is dark about half the time, and that a television image is just one bright, fast, discrete dot sweeping the screen. Motion pictures show one new frame (still picture of the movie clip) every 1/24th of a second and the same frame is shown three times during this time period (Persistence, 2001). The eye retains the image of each frame long enough, giving an illusion of smooth, continuous motion. Animation uses exactly the same principle to render the idea of motion.
This led to such devices as the zoetrope, or "wheel of life." The zoetrope has a short, fat cylinder, which rotated on its axis of symmetry. Around the inside of the cylinder was a sequence of drawings, each one slightly different from the one next to it. The cylinder had long slits cut into......
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