Video: UK Animators Use Cellphone and Microscope To Film Smallest Stop-Motion Animation Ever

Dot, Star of the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Animation Nokia

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

Follow 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency, rides a bumblebee and stitches her way out of trouble. The music is catchy too.

Animators at the UK studio Aardman used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or 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 one was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.

Directors Ed Patterson and Will Studd attached a CellScope (winner of a PopSci Best of What’s New award in 2008) to a Nokia N8 12-megapixel camera to film Dot’s struggle in her microscopic world. They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.

CellScope is the brainchild of Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, who combined a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope. Source: Reposted from www.popsci.com

Watch Dot’s adventure below.

Professor Fletcher’s invention of the CellScope, which is a Nokia device with a microscope attachment, was the inspiration for a teeny-tiny film created by Sumo Science at Aardman. It stars a 9mm girl called Dot as she struggles through a microscopic world. All the minuscule detail was shot using CellScope technology and a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics.

See more projects and how the ‘Dot’ film was made at http://www.nokia.com/nseries or http://www.facebook.com/nokia

Mockingjay (Hunger Games Series #3) by Suzanne Collins

Publishers Weekly

This concluding volume in Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy accomplishes a rare feat, the last installment being the best yet, a beautifully orchestrated and intelligent novel that succeeds on every level. At the end of Catching Fire, Katniss had been dramatically rescued from the Quarter Quell games; her fellow tribute, Peeta, has presumably been taken prisoner by the Capitol. Now the rebels in District 13 want Katniss (who again narrates) to be the face of the revolution, a propaganda role she’s reluctant to play. One of Collins’s many achievements is skillfully showing how effective such a poster girl can be, with a scene in which Katniss visits the wounded, cameras rolling to capture (and retransmit) her genuine outrage at the way in which war victimizes even the noncombatants. Beyond the sharp social commentary and the nifty world building, there’s a plot that doesn’t quit: nearly every chapter ends in a reversal-of-fortune cliffhanger. Readers get to know characters better, including Katniss’s sister and mother, and Plutarch Heavensbee, former Head Gamemaker, now rebel filmmaker, directing the circus he hopes will bring down the government, a coup possible precisely because the Capitol’s residents are too pampered to mount a defense. “In return for full bellies and entertainment,” he tells Katniss, explaining the Latin phrase panem et circenses, “people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.” Finally, there is the romantic intrigue involving Katniss, Peeta and Gale, which comes to a resolution that, while it will break some hearts, feels right. In short, there’s something here for nearly every reader, all of it completely engrossing. Ages 12-up

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Publishers Weekly
Fisher (the Oracle Prophesies series) scores a resounding success in this beautifully imagined science fantasy set in a far future where, many years earlier, civilization was artificially frozen at late-medieval levels in order to save the world from dangerous technologies. Simultaneously, all of the world’s malcontents and madmen were sealed into an unimaginably vast, sentient prison named Incarceron, where a dedicated group of social engineers intended to create utopia. Claudia, the brilliant daughter of the cold-blooded warden of Incarceron, has been raised from birth to marry and eventually control Caspar, the simpleminded heir to the throne. Finn, a young man without a past, is a prisoner in Incarceron, which has become a hideous dystopia, an “abyss that swallows dreams.” When Claudia and Finn each gain possession of a high-tech “key” to the prison, they exchange messages, and Finn asks Claudia to help him attempt an escape. While he negotiates the hideous maze of the prison, Claudia makes her way through the equally deadly labyrinth of political intrigue. Complex and inventive, with numerous and rewarding mysteries, this tale is certain to please. Ages 12–up.

Cake is back – Short Skirt Long Jacket

Music video by Cake performing Short Skirt/Long Jacket. (C) 2001 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

For the Star Wars fans: Droid 2 R2-D2 edition

The little astromech smartphone that could (pilfer your wallet) is now touching down in at least one Verizon Wireless store, according to spy shots via Boy Genius Report. The Motorola Droid 2 R2-D2 edition launch kit contains just a dummy unit, not an extremely well-put together little Droid, so you won’t find any lightspeed animation contained within. Still, if it’s the faceplate you want see up close and personal, looks like you might get a chance at just that a tinge earlier than September 30th.

Source : www.engadet.com