This afternoon at Helix we used pencils and folded paper to make flip-stick animations! Check out Parker’s animation below!

What’s going on?
Your eye and brain retain a visual impression for about 1/30th of a second. (The exact time depends on the brightness of the image.) This ability to retain an image is known as persistence of vision.

Persistence of vision accounts for our failure to notice that a motion picture screen is dark about half the time, and that a television image is just one bright, fast, little dot sweeping the screen. Motion pictures show one new frame every 1/24th of a second. Each frame is shown three times during this period. The eye retains the image of each frame long enough to give us the illusion of smooth motion.