Filmmaker Nico Casavecchia worked with a team of IBM scientists to create “A Boy And His Atom”— a movie, which has been verified by Guinness World Records™ as The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.
IBM used a remotely operated two-ton scanning tunnelling microscope at its lab in San Jose, Calif., to make the movie earlier this year. The microscope magnifies the surface over 100 million times. It operates at 450 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (268 degrees below zero Celsius).
Scientists used the microscope to control a tiny, super-sharp needle along a copper surface, IBM said. At a distance of just 1 nanometre, the needle physically attracted the carbon monoxide molecules and pulled them to a precisely specified location on the surface.
The dots that make up the figures in the movie are the oxygen atoms in the molecule, says Andreas Heinrich, IBM’s principal scientist for the project.
The scientists took 242 still images that make up the movie’s 242 frames.
Read comments by the filmmaker describing the challenges of making a movie on this scale with some interesting facts on production.
Source: AAP
