A Boy and His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie

This is, literally, the world’s smallest movie. It’s made of atoms – one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe. Just how small is an atom? Well, to see one, you need to magnify it 100 million times. In other words, there are about five million atoms in the period at the end of this sentence. Each frame of this film was made by moving thousands of atoms to their exact placements by the scientists at IBM’s research lab. The frames were combined into an animation -the world’s smallest movie – that tells the story of a boy and a wayward atom who meet and become friends.