Shooting Movies Without Shooting Yourself in the Foot

CHAPTER 28 Cameras: Black Boxes

Movie cameras—and I mean film and digital and any other methods of image acquisition yet to be developed—are magic devices that produce the illusion of continuous movement by putting together a succession of still pictures, with slight variations from frame to frame, viewed so quickly as to fool the audience into thinking they're seeing real motion. Generally, the phenomenon is called persistence of vision. It's not a perfectly accurate term, and you can find the best explanation I've seen in Bruce Kawin's book How Movies Work.¹ So we have a box that can record millions of still pictures that, when shown in succession and alignment, create the illusion of motion. How does it do that?

MOTION PICTURE CAMERA

Any camera ...