The Art Direction Handbook for Film & Television, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3Visual History

The visual history of film and television can be distilled from what we understand about how we view “apparent” motion of moving pictures. It is generally agreed that the majority of people use vision to navigate through the world by interpreting the visual information they encounter. And, it is equally correct to say that the psychological processing of this visual information is known as visual perception. But here is where scientists and filmmakers have parted ways for more than a century; they disagree about how we perceive what we perceive. Persistence of vision is the myth in question. “It answers our central question of origin: Why, when we look at a succession of still images on the film screen or TV set, are we ...