“Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope, the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world’s smallest stop-motion animation film.
Follow 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency, rides a bumblebee and stitches her way out of trouble. The music is catchy too.
Animators at the UK studio Aardman used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters. The figurine’s tiny features stretched the limit of the printer — any smaller and it would be hard to make distinct limbs. Each one was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.
Directors Ed Patterson and Will Studd attached a CellScope (winner of a PopSci Best of What’s New award in 2008) to a Nokia N8 12-megapixel camera to film Dot’s struggle in her microscopic world. They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.
CellScope is the brainchild of Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, who combined a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope.”
Read more at PopSci (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
This is good can’t believe was shot ona mobile phone. Well done the creators.
Awesome! Absolutely brilliant!
“They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.”
vice
“They said Nokia commissioned them to help them sell their new N8 mobile phone which was released on 1 Oct ”
Certainly it was a very enjoyable piece of work and I hope more adverts go this way in the future.
FWIW I believe just about any mobile phone could have been used for this given that the internal camera sensor was supplimented by the microscope’s optics; and it’s the optics that generally the biggest let down for mobile phones as cameras.
That’s one of the most impressive things I’ve seen in a good while
@mrtotes
While it is certainly true that the microscope played its part in producing these images, I’d like to point out that the optics on the Nokia N8 are by Carl Zeiss and are the best ever incorporated into a cameraphone.
Check out this Flickr set for photos taken with no microscope attached: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dinning/sets/72157624971870802/
(disclosure: I work for Nokia, but this is still true!)
Wow she’s pretty for a tiny lil figurine. The man that marries her is a lucky man. The creators are awesome too. Me likey.
Hats off to the team that made that. It’s very surprising that such a film can be made with a mobile phone.