Dot: The Worlds Smallest Stop Motion?

Dot is a mere 9 millimeters tall and stretches the 3-D printing technology and stop motion to its limits.

Aardman Animations, well known for Creature Comforts, Wallace and Gromit, Shawn the Sheep and other popular films decided to make the smallest possible stop motion film they could. Not as in time or small budgets. And not as in cheating to make things appear small when they weren't. What they did was to literally create the smallest replacement puppets ever for a stop motion film.

The whole film was shot on a Nokia N8 and CellScope technology. The CellScope is basically just a microscope hooked up to the camera. The puppet was made in 3-D software and printed on 3-D printers as small as they could possibly print them without loss of details. They also had to make sure they could paint the features by hand. You can watch both the film and the making-of below:

  Dim lights

Dim lights

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Willard Wigan
written by ben whitehouse, September 29, 2010

Hey Marc. I wish I could of been online for last weeks live chat as I think I could of spiced up the discussion about Dot. Here is a link to a guy from my home town, Willard Wigan. He is famous for making sculptures in the eye's of needles. It should be very interesting for people to learn about his process and the tools he uses.





Heres the link to his video page on his website. you can also find more on youtube.
http://www.willard-wigan.com/video.aspx

Although they didn't do it on the same scale, I think it is a good example of why Aardman chose to go the 3d print route as getting someone to hand sculpt the Dot replacements would have taken far too long to meet the deadline.

Also a studio in my city did some animation for a feature film on Willard Wigan. They also used 3d printed replacements but not on a small scale, theirs are about the size of your average puppet.You can read more about that on their website and view the shots as well.

http://www.secondhomeproductio...pr=p_micro

Anyway I hope this is of some interest to you.

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