Quickness Analogy

Frame Rates. Undoubtedly over the last few years you have watched a computer animated film. Perhaps it was a Disney-Pixar Movie (or just Pixar, if it was long enough ago). There is a great possibility that the movie Toy Story has passed through your life. You saw how fluidly the motion was, but were you aware that you were staring at still frames? Did you know that the motion you perceived was created by entirely static images?

‘Whoa Now!’ you gasp, ‘How can that be?’ Simply put it is the illusion of motion. A screen will never move, but simply project whatever image it is fed, and so a static page like the one this text is on appears stationary, but when things are sped up, things become interesting.
A digital movie is really a massive amount of frames quickly shown one after another. The human eye can sense up to 70 different shifts in those picture per second, but beyond that and the mind eye connection begins to falter. Toy Story for example runs at 24 frames per second, that is 24 different pictures are displayed within a second to give the illusion of speed. Cartoons are often only 15 frames per second which is barely above the 12 fps that humans can perceive as laggy. Video games generally run around 30 fps.

Thus frame rates are an analogy for Calvino’s memo on quickness as they create motion through a process that is too fast for the human eye to catch using still images.