Animation | My Science Mind

Category Archives: Animation

Dot is Wallace & Gromit’s little sister

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

Talk about tiny, Dot is only a third of an inch tall!

Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope, the team behind the Wallace & Gromit films has made the world’s smallest stop-motion animation film.

They made it to help celebrate the invention of the CellScope, a tiny hand-held microscope invented by a scientist at the University of California-Berkeley. It allows doctors to view and record things like ear aches and sore throats. It is basically a 50x magnification lens on a cellphone camera. (You can read more about it here.)

The animators also used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to 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 version of Dot was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.

Claymation Chess

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

This short film of a chess game brought to life was created using the stop-motion photography technique called “clay animation“. In this type of animation, all of the movement is created by people modeling the clay by hand. Then each change is briefly filmed with only one or two frames. It usually takes 12 changes of position to make one second of film. That means that this tiny film, which lasts 111 seconds, has 1,332 position changes!