Persistence of Vision

Persistence of vision is a theory which states that the human eye always retains images for a fraction of a second (estimated 0.04seconds), this means that everything we see is a kind of subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago. In film and video, this is claimed to account for our ability to perceive a sequence of frames as one continuous moving picture, the human eye registers around 30 still images (frames) per second, so any animation at 30 fps (frames per second) or over will be perceived as a fluid motion.

The Zoetrope - a collection of images inside a cylinder which when viewed fromt he side created a small looped animation, this was one of the first devices that used a succession of rapidly changing images to create an animation. It was created by a British /mathematician called William Horner.

An example of a modern form of persistence of vision would be a flip book, of all the animation techniques out there nowadays, the flip book is one of the most easiest to make, you just need a booklet containing a series of images and when thumbed through quickly, are animated - each page in the booklet acts as a frame that is registered by the human eye.

Another example of this would be claymation, using stop motion animation to create the illusion of persistence of vision, each image captured acting like a page in a flip book.

Time Lapse

Time-lapse photography is a technique that records a scene or objects that has a slow state-of-change and turns into a video that plays back in a higher speed. The easiest way to do this is to set up a stationary camera directed at something that slowly changes, for example a cloudy sky or a budding flower, and start to taking a series of photographs every so often for a few hours or even days. The images that have been taken are then compressed into a video with a few seconds or even minutes (depending on how many photographs are taken) playtime, this then creates a time lapsing effect.

The link below is an example of this showing one picture being taken every 40 minutes over a period of 74 days played back at 30fps.

Fruit and Vegetable Decomposition, Time Lapse

Cut Out

This is one of the oldest forms of animation and before computers was probably the easiest ways to create an animation. Cut-Out animation involves moving shapes that have been cut out (for example paper) and moved slightly, taking a picture at each stage, this is a lot less work than having to draw every single frame. You don't need a special program designed for cut-out animation to try it out, you can easily copy the process using software like Adobe Flash, by using motion Tweens and symbols, you don't have to manually set up every frame.

The link below shows a quick cut-out animation (using paper) lasting over a minute.

Rusalka - A Paper Cut-Out Animation

Pixilation