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The drive towards more reality: frame-rates revisited

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The drive towards more reality: frame-rates revisited

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“Frame rate is the engine behind the cinematic lie.”
Alice O’Connor

The amount of time each film frame remains on screen before being replaced by the following image needs to be high enough to create the illusion of movement.

The human brain can perceive between 10 and 12 individual frames every second. Anything faster than this makes our brains blend the frames together into an illusion of movement. This is the basis of animation and is called the ‘Phi Phenomenon’.

The technology available today for cameras and playback allow for very high frame rates and there has been a trend in recent films (3D, CGI) to shoot and play back on frame rates much higher than those needed for the illusion of movement and those used in conventional cinema.

History of frame rates

In the early days of cinema, silent film frame rates varied widely. Cameras and projectors were often hand-cranked. Film strips were projected with a black shutter between each frame and in order for this black flicker of the screen (going dark every second frame) to be undetectable to audiences, each frame was flashed more than once (effectively played back as twos or threes).

Once sound was introduced, a more stable frame rate was required and the established rate became 24 frames per second (that is, each of the 12 frames needed for the Phi Phenomenon displayed twice, on twos). This set frame rate
came to dominate the way all cinema and moving image looked, and still mostly does.

TV: PAL and NTSC

When electronic frame rates came into being with television, problems with flicker and bandwidth were resolved by ‘interlacing’ frames in a comb-like fashion. Each frame would be refreshed at a rate set to the electrical alternating current (AC) of the country. 25fps (PAL) for countries operating on 50 hz AC - Africa, Europe, most of Asia and 30fps for countries operating on 60 hz AC (NTSC) the Americas and Japan.

Digital and CGI

With the introduction of digital media there were less structural reasons to limit what frame rates could be. Filmmakers have tried to push the ‘temporal resolution’ to increase ‘realism’ and decrease motion blur. Tests done on high frame rates such as 60fps were interpreted to produce stronger emotional responses in test audiences and frames as high as 120 fps have been developed (4K) and used in video games and sports broadcasts. Peter Jackson’s CGI
animated and live action hybrid blockbuster The Hobbit (2012) was screened at 48 fps (frames per second), twice that of normal 24 fps speed. Jackson argued that this high frame rate made for a clearer, more ‘real’ film.

Questions

It’s a moot point amongst audiences and critics what ‘more real’ means, particularly in the context of CGI. Audience members of The Hobbit complained of headaches and others complained that the ‘high realism’ of the film gave it the look of a ‘made for TV movie’.

It is arguable that the incursion of animated CGI into almost every aspect of commercial narrative film and moving image is beginning to deconstruct the nature of cinema; drawing cinema away from its historically close relationship with literature and pulling it towards the world of computer games both in visual content and structural make up.

Most moving image and cinema are still recorded for playback at 24 fps; a cadence that remains for the time being, something that audiences are more comfortable with.

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TASK:
Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?
If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?
Use OCA’s discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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TASK:
Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?
If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?
Use OCA's discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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TASK:Do you agree with Peter Jackson that high frame rates allow an audience to see more reality?If so, do you think this is desirable? If not, what other motivation do film-makers and animators have in pushing for such high frame rates?Use OCA's discuss forums to share your thoughts and any animation references.

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It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now? 

CREDITS:

Written and animated by Alan Warburton with the support of Tom Pounder and Wieden + Kennedy. 
Music by Cool 3D World (http://cool3dworld.com/)
Special thanks to: Leanne Redfern, Nico Engelbrecht, Iain Tait, Indiana Matine, Katrina Sluis, David Surman, Jacob Gaboury and Daniel Rourke.

Animated backgrounds generously provided by:

•	Quixel (https://quixel.se/)
•	Katarina Markovic (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcr4QTtAK9N96pf_Z_zVqWg)
•	Roman Senko (https://vimeo.com/rendan)
 
Featuring work by:

•	Al and Al (http://www.alandal.co.uk/)
•	Albert Omoss (http://omoss.io/)
•	Alex McLeod (http://www.alxclub.com/)
•	Barry Doupe (http://www.barrydoupe.ca/)
•	Claudia Hart (http://www.claudiahart.com/)
•	Cool 3D World (http://cool3dworld.com/)
•	Dave Fothergill (https://vimeo.com/davefothergillvfx)
•	Dave Stewart (https://vimeo.com/davegrafix)
•	Drages Animation (https://www.youtube.com/user/drakhean)
•	El Popo Sangre (https://vimeo.com/elpoposangre)
•	Esteban Diacono (http://www.estebandiacono.com)
•	Eva Papamargariti (http://evapapamargariti.tumblr.com/)
•	Filip Tarczewski (https://vimeo.com/ftarczewski)
•	Geoffrey Lillemon (http://www.geoffreylillemon.com/website/)
•	Jacolby Satterwhite (http://jacolby.com/home.html)
•	Jesse Kanda (http://www.jessekanda.com/)
•	John Butler (https://vimeo.com/user3946359)
•	Jonathan Monaghan (http://jonmonaghan.com/)
•	Jun Seo Hahm (https://vimeo.com/junseohahm)
•	Kathleen Daniel (http://www.duh-real.com/)
•	Katie Torn (http://katietorn.com/index.html)
•	Kim Laughton (http://kimlaughton.tumblr.com/)
•	Kouhei Nakama (http://kouheinakama.com/)
•	LuYang (http://luyang.asia/)
•	Mike Pelletier (http://mikepelletier.net/)
•	Nic Hamilton (https://nichamilton.info/)
•	Pussykrew (http://hybrid-universe-emulation.net/)
•	Rick Silva (http://ricksilva.net/)
•	Sanatorios (https://www.instagram.com/sanatorios/)
•	Zeitguised (http://www.zeitguised.com)

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A presentation I made for the Edge of Frame Weekend seminar at The Whitechapel gallery in East London, December 2016. Artists, curators and academics were asked to explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions. Rather than presenting papers, we were challenged to cite up to three works that illustrated our case.

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“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak.”
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1. Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen's films the main character is out of focus. It's not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen's character is an actor, this becomes a major problem: he is unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)

But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film projection was available. Although there was at the speaker's disposal a perfectly standard DVD player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of the archive.

This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare-tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker's film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists' viewing copies are bartered. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and Piracy

That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images-their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.

Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also affects film archives-in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting framework of national culture. As I once observed in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

4. Imperfect Cinema

The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written in Cuba in the late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, "perfect cinema-technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema." The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets-a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images-images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production. Capital's semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.

This flattening-out of visual content-the concept-in-becoming of the images-positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization. The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism. In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema-to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original," but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates "visual bonds," as Dziga Vertov once called them. This "visual bond" was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections-collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits-reveal erratic and coincidental links between producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov's "visual bonds," the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor image-ambivalent as its status may be-thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov's idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, "Comrade, what is your visual bond today?"

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

6. Now!

The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man's land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back-as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then-please, anybody-show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing-the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

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In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10

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Compression or data compression is a digital process in which image or moving image information is reduced to make file sizes more manageable. Compression reduces file size by eliminating unused digital elements (lossless) or reducing less important information (lossy), such as subtle tones. Too much lossy compression can negatively affect image quality.

TASK:
Reflect on selected animations in relation to Steyerl’s views in
her essay, In Defence of the Poor Image.
Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways.
Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

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TASK:
Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways. Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. Your essay can be presented in written, audio or video form (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

Reflect on these animations in relation to Steyerl's quotes above and look up and
read her essay, In Defence of the Poor Image .Illustrate with images if needed.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

. For additional context, you may want to review Alan Warburton's videos Spectacle, Speculation, Spam and Goodbye Uncanny Valley from the previous exercise.

Compression or data compression is a digital process in which image or moving image information is reduced to make file sizes more manageable. Compression reduces file size by eliminating unused digital elements (lossless) or reducing less important information (lossy), such as subtle tones. Too much lossy compression can negatively affect image quality.

Image quality

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak."
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)

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TASK:Identify animations that uses good and/or bad image quality in interesting ways. Write a short piece (written, audio or animated) that draws together your research and viewpoints on image quality. Your essay can be presented in written, audio or video form (Approximately 1500 words, 3 minutes audio or 1 minute video).

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.

"Frame rate is the engine behind the cinematic lie."
Alice O'Connor

The amount of time each film frame remains on screen before being replaced by the following image needs to be high enough to create the illusion of movement.

The human brain can perceive between 10 and 12 individual frames every second. Anything faster than this makes our brains blend the frames together into an illusion of movement. This is the basis of animation and is called the 'Phi Phenomenon'.

The technology available today for cameras and playback allow for very high frame rates and there has been a trend in recent films (3D, CGI) to shoot and play back on frame rates much higher than those needed for the illusion of movement and those used in conventional cinema.

History of frame rates

In the early days of cinema, silent film frame rates varied widely. Cameras and projectors were often hand-cranked. Film strips were projected with a black shutter between each frame and in order for this black flicker of the screen (going dark every second frame) to be undetectable to audiences, each frame was flashed more than once (effectively played back as twos or threes).

Once sound was introduced, a more stable frame rate was required and the established rate became 24 frames per second (that is, each of the 12 frames needed for the Phi Phenomenon displayed twice, on twos). This set frame rate
came to dominate the way all cinema and moving image looked, and still mostly does.
TV: PAL and NTSC
When electronic frame rates came into being with television, problems with flicker and bandwidth were resolved by 'interlacing' frames in a comb-like fashion. Each frame would be refreshed at a rate set to the electrical alternating current (AC) of the country. 25fps (PAL) for countries operating on 50 hz AC - Africa, Europe, most of Asia and 30fps for countries operating on 60 hz AC (NTSC) the Americas and Japan.
Digital and CGI
With the introduction of digital media there were less structural reasons to limit what frame rates could be. Filmmakers have tried to push the 'temporal resolution' to increase 'realism' and decrease motion blur. Tests done on high frame rates such as 60fps were interpreted to produce stronger emotional responses in test audiences and frames as high as 120 fps have been developed (4K) and used in video games and sports broadcasts. Peter Jackson's CGI
animated and live action hybrid blockbuster The Hobbit (2012) was screened at 48 fps (frames per second), twice that of normal 24 fps speed. Jackson argued that this high frame rate made for a clearer, more 'real' film.
Questions
It's a moot point amongst audiences and critics what 'more real' means, particularly in the context of CGI. Audience members of The Hobbit complained of headaches and others complained that the 'high realism' of the film gave it the look of a 'made for TV movie'.

It is arguable that the incursion of animated CGI into almost every aspect of commercial narrative film and moving image is beginning to deconstruct the nature of cinema; drawing cinema away from its historically close relationship with literature and pulling it towards the world of computer games both in visual content and structural make up.

Most moving image and cinema are still recorded for playback at 24 fps; a cadence that remains for the time being, something that audiences are more comfortable with.

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TASK: To demonstrate that you fully grasp the concept of frame rates, write a short paragraph explaining the difference between slow motion and frames per second in your ongoing glossary of terms. Cite any web or literature references that you use.