The fastest movie ever captured
There’s a case to be made that movies these days are too long, but a team of intrepid scientists decided to go in the complete opposite direction to make the fastest film ever captured on camera.
In terms of standard production, there are a couple of features to have been shot in less than 24 hours, which is ridiculous enough. 1999’s Tamil-language comedy drama Suyamvaram shot an entire film that runs for a whopping 155 minutes in 23 hours and 58 minutes. That’s an incredible achievement, even more so considering the sheer volume of moving parts involved.
In addition to 14 directors, there were 19 associate directors, 45 assistant directors, 19 cameramen, 36 assistant cameramen, five dance masters, 16 assistants, 140 chorus dancers, stunt coordinators, art director, makeup, costume and set designers, and the 1,483 extras required, and yet it still can’t hold a candle to the bespoke art of molecular moviemaking.
In January 2011, researchers used ultra-fast X-ray pulses to capture images using a FLASH laser, which culminated in a 2-frame movie of a model depicting the Brandenburg Gate, which runs for just 50 femtoseconds. For those who aren’t clued up on the intricacies of time to a level that would make Christopher Nolan blush, a single femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. Essentially, the time interval is 0.00000000000005 seconds, which boggles the mind by any metric.
It was part of a desire to observe molecules and nanostructures in real-time, with the concept of a ‘molecular movie’ showing its observants how a molecule behaves at the pivotal moment in a chemical reaction, which in turn would offer a greater understanding of the very fundamentals of natural science.
According to Analytical Science, the Hamburg-based team responsible for the fastest-ever movie captured on film revealed that “in this short time interval, even a ray of light travels no further than the width of a human hair,” to offer an indication of just how minuscule a level they were working on.
The shorter the wavelength of the X-rays, the more detail can be revealed, with the goal being to use molecular movies to illustrate the dynamics of the objects being captured. It’s big brain stuff that’s best left to the professionals, considering that increasing frame rates beyond cinema’s standard 24 frames per second in the likes of James Cameron’s Avatar, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and Ang Lee’s Gemini Man generated undesirable headaches and migraines in some viewers.
That was only up to 120 frames per second in certain cases, but when you start getting into quadrillionths of seconds and the potential to witness chemical reactions on a molecular level through the means of film, it’s innumerable steps beyond anything even the boundary-pushing Cameron could even contemplate.
