18.1 Principles of Animation

To use the animation building tools available in GIMP and the GAP plug-in effectively, you must first understand the underlying principles of animation. First, we present the physiology of viewing animations and their internal and external digital representations, and then we discuss how these principles work in GIMP.

Frame Frequency and Vision

Animations are made with a sequence of images, called frames. Images persist on the eye’s retina, especially when there is a strong contrast between light and dark (as in a movie theater), so when images are displayed in quick succession, they appear to be a continuous animation.

Currently, the standard frame frequency is 24 frames per second. Hand-drawn cartoons were usually filmed ...

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