A Boy and His Atom – The Worlds Smallest Film
Only in animation could you create this.
A Boy and His Atom is the world smallest film. How small? Well it is created using atoms, those little blurring ball bearing-type things you see are the building blocks of everything around us. To give you an idea of scale, the secondary character the “ball” is made up of one single atom, while you or I are made up of roughly 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms (well, I might weigh one or two more than you, I’ve been getting fat recently). So you can see what an extraordinary achievement this is for science as well as for animation as every atom had to be moved individually to position itself for each frame.
The film itself puts you in mind of something by James Stewart Blackton or an 8 bit movie, as the character movement and the design is relatively simple. Obviously such a thing is quite forgivable considering the scale of the material! The film is made by IBM researchers as part of a wider initiative to create microscopic technology in an effort to reverse Moore’s law, building technology on an atomic scale and working up. A truly remarkable achievement brought to you by the wonder of science and the marvel of animation!
The making of
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