There are short movies, but then there’s A Boy And His Atom, a movie that is not only short by time, but also short by size. The minute-long film was made by IBM using single atoms and has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the tiniest movie in the world.
According to The BBC, IBM used a scanning tunnelling microscope to move individual carbon atoms much like animators do for conventional stop-motion films. A Boy And his Atom shows the technology’s ability to turn a collection of atoms into a boy playing with a small ball that transforms into a trampoline.
The STM tool won the 1986 Nobel prize in physics. It uses a charged needle that helps move the atoms. It took 242 frames to put the film together.
“The tip of the needle is both our eyes and our hands: it senses the atoms to make images of where the atoms are, and then it is moved closer to the atoms to tug them along the surface to new positions,” IBM’s Andreas Heinrich told the BBC.
“The atoms hold still at their new positions because they form chemical bonds to the copper atoms in the surface underneath, and that lets us take an image of the whole arrangement of atoms in each frame of the film.” He added that between each frame, they can move the atoms.
The Atlantic reports that IBM also uploaded a detailed video explaining the painstaking process it took to make it and gave a tour of the ‘set.’
Here’s the film:
Here’s the behind-the-scenes look at the film:
image: YouTube/screenshot