We wanted to post these pictures for our favourite book illustrator, Lynne Chapman - way over there in Sheffield UK - who drew the beautiful pastel pictures in this very book we are holding, The Big Bad Wolf is Good.
When I took these photos and scrolled through them, they reminded me of flipbooks - the set of still images you flick over to make a continuous moving picture. Before movies were invented there were a number of optical devices that produced animation effects like this. With weird and unpronounceable names such as thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, these devices let you view a spinning card with small images on it, each like a single frame in an animated movie. It has always fascinated me, this movie projecting business, and I found these neat facts on The Science Explorer.
If a light is flashing on and off more than thirty times a second, you see it as a steady light--you don't notice the flickering. When you watch a movie, the light from the projector is flickering 72 times a second. Your eye and brain blend the flickering frames of the movie to make a single moving picture.
When you look at a picture, then quickly flip to another picture, your eye and brain remember the first picture for a fraction of a second, and blend it with the second picture. This visual ability, known as persistence of vision, makes the pictures in movies appear to move.Isn't that amazing trickery?
Now for scene two of our flipbook. Here we are with Duckling No 5. who always makes us cry! He's lost his Mummy. Happy faces. Sad faces! Lynne kindly posted the original drawing of No 5 on her blog especially for us. Sniff, sniff!
