Flipbook

Stop-motion animation

My flipbook uses simplicity of image linked with a frame rate of around 20. Although it's slightly jittery, the story is still recognised - a ball bouncing. Whenever the ball hit the floor, I drew the impact by making the ball squash down for one frame.

Frame rate is the amount of frames shown per second in a video. Whilst 10 frames a second is slower and less smooth, good animations use around 30 to 40 frames per second. Whilst this frame rate will look smooth, game engines such as Source which is used to run games like Half Life 2, Portal and Counter Strike can easily achieve 200 frames per second, looking incredibly realistic - as if looking through a window.

Perception of motion is the retention of the past frame whilst simultaneously retaining the current one. It means that videos with high frame rate will look realistic and as if real life - but it is, in fact, an illusion. An early use of perception of motion was simply shown with a disk on a string; on one side a bird, on the other a cage. When the disk is quickly spun on the string, the first frame is retained (the bird) while the second frame is shown (the cage). The illusion is that the bird is in the cage.