homehome Home chatchat Notifications


Smallest 3D stop-animation yet pays tribute to David Bowie

A new film pushes the boundaries of stop motion cinematography by employing 3D figurines the size of a grain of dust.

Tibi Puiu
November 27, 2019 @ 1:11 am

share Share

The main character in the frame-by-frame short animation is only 300 microns in height or 0.3 millimeters. That’s about as large as a grain of sand, which is almost imperceptible to the human eye.

The scale of production is so tiny that director Tibo Pinsard had to use a scanning electron microscope (SEM) developed at the FEMTO-ST Institute in Besançon, France.

SEMs use a specific set of coils to scan the beam in a raster-like pattern and use the electrons that are reflected or knocked off the near-surface region of a sample to form an image

In daily scientific work, SEMs can be used in a variety of industrial, commercial, and research applications.

In order to give the impression of movement, the filmmakers made hundreds of these tiny 3D-printed figurines that eerily resemble David Bowie and carefully placed them inside a vacuum chamber where they were imaged frame by frame by the SEM.

The SEM’s camera records in greyscale, which coupled with the effects of electric charges paint a mysterious atmosphere.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the film was named Stardust Odyssey, a tribute to Bowie as well as to the fact that the miniatures are the size of dust particles.

Stardust Odyssey was co-produced by the French movie company Darrowan Prod, the Université de Franche-Comté represented by the FEMTO-ST Institute and the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Below is a behind the scenes documentary.


share Share

A Common DNA Sugar Just Matched Minoxidil in Hair Regrowth Tests on Mice

Is the future of hair regrowth hidden in 2-deoxy-D-ribose?

Your Personal Air Defense System Is Here and It’s Built to Vaporize Up to 30 Mosquitoes per Second with Lasers

LiDAR-guided Photon Matrix claims to fell 30 mosquitoes a second, but questions remain.

Astronomers Found a Star That Exploded Twice Before Dying

A rare double explosion in space may rewrite supernova science.

Buried in a Pot, Preserved by Time: Ancient Egyptian Skeleton Yields First Full Genome

DNA from a 4,500-year-old skeleton reveals ancestry links between North Africa and the Fertile Crescent.

New Nanoparticle Vaccine Clears Pancreatic Cancer in Over Half of Preclinical Models

The pancreatic cancer vaccine seems to work so well it's even surprising its creators

Coffee Could Help You Live Longer — But Only If You Have it Black

Drinking plain coffee may reduce the risk of death — unless you sweeten it.

AI-Based Method Restores Priceless Renaissance Art in Under 4 Hours Rather Than Months

A digital mask restores a 15th-century painting in just hours — not centuries.

The Real Singularity: AI Memes Are Now Funnier, On Average, Than Human Ones

People still make the funniest memes but AI is catching up fast.

Scientists Turn Timber Into SuperWood: 50% Stronger Than Steel and 90% More Environmentally Friendly

This isn’t your average timber.

A Provocative Theory by NASA Scientists Asks: What If We Weren't the First Advanced Civilization on Earth?

The Silurian Hypothesis asks whether signs of truly ancient past civilizations would even be recognisable today.