Tag Archives: cellscope

Dot is Wallace & Gromit’s little sister

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.