The world's smallest film made using a cameraphone and a microscope

Dot: The world's smallest film made using a cameraphone and a microscope

Fleeing as her world literally unravels behind her, this is Dot - the world’s smallest action hero.
Standing just 9mm tall, the tiny doll’s action-packed adventure is the basis for a new stop-motion film that was made using a cameraphone 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.

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 small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters – such as Wallace and Gromit.


The creators say that she was as small as it was possible to make her – any smaller and 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.

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

The microscope that was used to make the film work is known as a CellScope. It was developed by Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, as an attachment for camperaphones.

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 U.S. to take white-blood-cell counts at home.