The Persistence of Vision

If you really think about it, all video is technically stop motion. Video in its most basic form is just a huge number of individual frames played in sequential order at a very fast rate. At the standard rate, the human eye and brain perceives the individual frames as one continuous, fluid motion. This phenomenon is called the persistence of vision.

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At first, one pink dot disappears at a time in clockwise order, but as you stare at the center for a while, a green dot appears in the image and continues in this clockwise motion. The movement of the green dot becomes fluid.

Think of the individual frames in a movie as this green dot. The faster the frames are going, generally, the more fluid the motion looks. In stop motion, to get the desired effect of being "choppy" or "broken" the frame rate is decreased, therefore allowing the eye to catch each individual frame. The motion is not at all fluid.

The creators of many horror movies have used stop motion to their advantage, making the movements of creatures very creepy. Prime example? Gore Verbinski's The Ring: