martedì 30 giugno 2015

The smallest and biggest animations in the world

In 2010 Nokia wanted to advertise their new N8 phone in a fresh and creative way. They thought of producing incredible web-commercials that were meant to be the world's smallest and biggest stopmotion animation. So they asked the British Aardman Studios to help them along. Aardman Studios is a famous animation studio specialized in stopmotion: throughout the years, they created top-selling movies and series such as Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep.
In the smallest stopmotion animation, we find Dot, a little tiny girl of about 9 mm of height venturing into a little world made of tiny props. It was filmed using CellScope Technology, which transforms your cellphone in a microscope that can magnify things up to 50x.

It was shot with Nokia N8's 12 Megapixel Camera and Carl Zeiss optics.
Here is the animation.


And here is an interesting Making Of for the video where they explain how they got the idea and how they went about to bring it out. They used 3D printers to create the little puppet of Dot and animating every day all day brought them about 4 seconds done at a time.



Nokia also produced the biggest stopmotion animation and it is called Gulp. It stars a fisherman on a boat, sailing an ocean of sand and meeting fish and sea monsters on his way. It also was shot with a Nokia N8, this time set on a crane.
Here is the video.



And here is the corresponding Making Of. This time with 16 hours of work, they get about 20 seconds. They filmed during daytime for the first part of the video; then they filmed during the night to simulate the big fish's dark stomach.


Recently though, the record has been broken. The smallest animation was achieved for another commercial by IBM. The animation was created by moving atoms! Yes, carbon monoxide atoms that were moved using a scanning tunneling microscope. IBM has been conducting a lot of research in the field of atomic data storage and mastered the technique of moving atoms over the years. The animation is called "A boy and his atom" and we can see a little boy playing along with is pet atom. Here is the animation.


And here is how they did it. The background is a piece of copper.



The movie got in the Guinness World Records as the World's Smallest Stop-Motion film.

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