The world record for the smallest movie ever made
Contemporary cinema is so often sold as being the biggest, most epic experience that your retinas have ever been scarred by. We’re talking about films like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune or James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which have each broken records for their sheer size and scope. But, what about the other end of the spectrum, films that are made on such a small scale that they can’t even be seen with the naked eye?
This bizarre achievement was made back in 2013 when IBM Research Laboratories released a film that was just 60 nanometres in size. To put that into context, there are 1,000,000 nanometres in one millimetre, making the unit of measurement so small that you can only properly see it under a microscope. Indeed, IBM’s film was far from the standard work of Steven Spielberg or Stanley Kubrick.
With 242 individual frames sized at 45 nanometres by 25 nanometres, the film, titled A Boy and His Atom, holds the record for being the smallest movie ever made by quite some distance. The unique minute-long short film was made using carbon monoxide molecules as pixels on a sheet of copper, with each molecule being positioned by the fine metal tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope.
Incredibly limited in the story it can tell, the film showed a young boy named Atom playing with a ball and can be compared with some of cinema’s most rudimental early animated efforts as well as the world of eight-bit video games.
Speaking about the movie project leader Andreas J. Heinrich stated: “This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world… The reason we made this was not to convey a scientific message directly, but to engage with students, to prompt them to ask questions”.
Released to the world to excitement from film fans and science enthusiasts, it didn’t take long for Hollywood to sit up and take notice, with Paramount reaching out to IBM to help them promote their 2013 science fiction flick Star Trek Into Darkness.
Speaking about the PR exercise, IBM said in a statement: “Scientists used a microscope the size of a room to maneuver single atoms to form the shapes of the Enterprise, the Vulcan salute, the Star Trek logo, a U.S.S. Enterprise the height of a single nanometer, and an animation of the Star Trek logo”.
Take a look at the short film below and enjoy the smallest movie ever made.
