Muybridge and a famous physiologist Marey's initial interest in stop motion was to probe events that occured beyond the threshold of human perception, in other words they seeked to figure out the amount of frames per second it would take for stop motion to appear continuous to the human eye rather than discrete which it truly is; these notions were grounded in the physiological concepts of "persistence of vision", how the brain retains images cast on the retina for a mere fraction of a second, and the "phi phenomenon", the creation of apparent movement between frames when they rapidly succeed each other.
Muybridge and a famous physiologist Marey's initial interest in stop motion was to probe events that occured beyond the threshold of human perception, in other words they seeked to figure out the amount of frames per second it would take for stop motion to appear continuous to the human eye rather than discrete which it truly is; these notions were grounded in the physiological concepts of "persistence of vision", how the brain retains images cast on the retina for a mere fraction of a second, and the "phi phenomenon", the creation of apparent movement between frames when they rapidly succeed each other.