Camera phone helps create world’s smallest movie

LONDON - Just 9 mm tall, Dot, the world’s tiniest doll, is the hero of an action-packed adventure in a new stop-motion film created with a camera phone and a microscope.

The film, simply called “Dot,” was produced by Aardmann, the creators of Wallace and Gromit. It was commissioned as a “viral” for Nokia and was made using the firm’s Nokia N8 smartphone.

Wallace and Gromit are the main characters in a series comprising four British animated short films and a feature-length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations.

Dot is to enter the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest film.

Dot finds herself in a magnified world and hears a noise coming from off-screen to her left. Suddenly she sees that the material on which she is standing is unstitching itself at an alarming rate, reports the Daily Mail.

Dot runs for her life, climbing flowers and even riding a bumble bee as she scampers to safety.

Animators used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too tiny to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters - such as Wallace and Gromit.

The creators say that it was not possible to make her smaller or they would have found it hard to make separate limbs and a head.

Each one was hand-painted by artists and attached to an extremely thin wire. The animators used precision engineering to move the backdrop behind the tiny Dot models.

The animation was filmed through a CellScope - microscope for mobile phones - which was attached to the N8 and its 12MP camera.

CellScope was developed by Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, in US, as an attachment for camera phones.

It is used in Africa to take photos of skin and blood cells and transmit the images to experts for diagnosis. It could soon be used by cancer patients in the US to take white-blood-cell counts at home.