Dot (film)

Last updated
Dot
Directed bySumo Science
Produced byHeather Wright
Starring Tamsin Egerton
Music by Ilan Eshkeri
Production
companies
Release date
  • 2010 (2010)
Running time
2 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Dot is a 2010 British animated short film created by Aardman Animations. It is a spot for the Nokia N8.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Production

University of California Berkeley professor Daniel Fletcher built a portable microscope which attaches to the Nokia N8 phone, for medical purposes. Nokia asked Aardman Animations to utilise both the microscope and the phone to create a short. [1] The entire film is shot using a Nokia N8. [2]

Marketing week explains: "To create 'Dot', Aardman's in-house production technology engineer, Lew Gardiner worked alongside the Physics Department at the University of Bristol to create their own CellScope production camera. Aardman used innovative Rapid Prototyping 3D printing technology that uses a computer-generated model of an object or character and then prints it in full 3D using a plastic resin material. The entire set was no more than a metre and a half long, all elements of which were used to help sell the scale of the project to the viewer." [2]

A making-of video was also released. [1]

Plot

Marketing Week explains "The film features Dot, a tiny 9mm girl who wakes up in a magical, magnified world to discover her surroundings are caving in around her." [2]

Cast

Critical reception

Forbes said "It's a great film, but what really got my attention was the making-of-video. The amount of work that went into putting together 97 seconds of animation together is staggering –and I love all the nerdy details, like how they produced the Dot models on a 3D printer." [1]

The executive producer of Dot and head of Aardman's commercials and branded content department, Heather Wright, commented: "The Nokia job is totally unique, one of those rare instances when the idea and execution are totally inter-dependent. It's very cool, challenging and very exciting for the studio." [2]

The short is in the 2011 issue of Guinness Book of World Records as "the world's smallest stop motion character animation." [1]

Awards and nominations

YearNominee / workAwardResult
2011Dot Webby Award for People's Voice Award in the AnimationWon [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animation</span> Method of creating moving pictures

Animation is a filmmaking technique by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer animation</span> Art of creating moving images using computers

Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating moving images. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both still images and moving images, while computer animation only refers to moving images. Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stop motion</span> Animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints or plasticine figures are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.

Aardman Animations Limited is a British animation studio based in Bristol, England. It is known for films and television series made using stop-motion and clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring its plasticine characters from Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Morph. After some experimental computer-animated short films during the late 1990s, beginning with Owzat (1997), Aardman entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006). As of February 2020, it had earned $1.1 billion worldwide, with an average $135.6 million per film.

<i>Rex the Runt</i> British animated comedy television series

Rex the Runt is a live-action stop-motion adult animated claymation pixilation comedy series, primarily consisting of a television show and two short films produced by Aardman Animations and Egmont Imagination for BBC Bristol, with EVA Entertainment co-producing the first series. Its main characters are four plasticine dogs: Rex, Wendy, Bad Bob and Vince.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claymation</span> Stop-motion animation made using malleable clay models

Claymation, sometimes called clay animation or plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.

The Works is a shelved animated feature film, partially produced from 1979 to 1986. If it had been finished as intended, it would have been the first film that was entirely 3D computer-animated. It included contributions from individuals who would go on to work at digital animation pioneers Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pendine Sands</span> Beach along Carmarthen Bay, south Wales

Pendine Sands is a 7-mile (11 km) beach on the shores of Carmarthen Bay on the south coast of Wales. It stretches west to east from Gilman Point to Laugharne Sands. The village of Pendine is close to the western end of the beach.

<i>Morph</i> (TV series) Claymation series on UK TV

Morph is a British series of clay stop-motion comedy animations, named after the main character, who is a small terracotta-skinned plasticine man, who speaks an unintelligible language and lives on a tabletop, his bedroom being a small wooden box. The character was initially seen interacting with Tony Hart, beginning in 1977, on several of his British television programmes, notably Take Hart, Hartbeat and SMart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nokia N93i</span>

The Nokia N93i is a mobile phone produced by Nokia, announced on 8 January 2007 and released the same month. It is part of the Nseries line and is a redesign of the Nokia N93. The N93i runs on Symbian OS version 9.1, with the S60 3rd Edition user interface. Like the N93, it is a clamshell and swivel design with a camera and landscape position.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics</span> Graphics created using computers

Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMOLED</span> Display technology for use in mobile devices and televisions

AMOLED is a type of OLED display device technology. OLED describes a specific type of thin-film-display technology in which organic compounds form the electroluminescent material, and active matrix refers to the technology behind the addressing of pixels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nokia N8</span> 2010 smartphone model manufactured by Nokia

The Nokia N8 is a touchscreen-based smartphone developed by Nokia. Announced on 27 April 2010, the Nokia N8 was the first device to run on the Symbian^3 mobile operating system and it was the company's flagship device for the year. It was released on 30 September 2010 at the Nokia Online Store before being released in markets around the world on 1 October 2010. There were two version made, the N8 and the N8-00. The N8 was made for Vodafone and locked to its networks, and the N8-00 was made by Microsoft and open network.

<i>Arthur Christmas</i> 2011 British-American Christmas comedy film

Arthur Christmas is a 2011 animated Christmas comedy film produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation in association with Aardman Animations, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film is Aardman's second mostly computer-animated feature film after 2006's Flushed Away. It was directed by Sarah Smith, co-directed by Barry Cook, and written by Smith and Peter Baynham. Featuring the voices of James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton, and Ashley Jensen, the film centres on Arthur Claus, the clumsy but well-meaning son of Santa Claus, who discovers that his father's high-tech ship has failed to deliver one girl's present. Accompanied only by his free-spirited and reckless grandfather, an enthusiastic Christmas elf obsessed with wrapping gifts, and a team of reindeer, he embarks on a mission to deliver the girl's present personally in the early morning hours of Christmas Day before sunrise.

Technologies Nawmal Inc., formerly known as Nawmal Ltd., and simply known as Nawmal, is a Canadian digital entertainment company based in Montreal, Canada, that produces do-it-yourself animation software for the web and desktop and turned words from a script into an animated movie using text-to-speech and animation technologies.

<i>A Boy and His Atom</i> Stop-motion short movie created on an atomic scale

A Boy and His Atom is a 2013 stop-motion animated short film released on YouTube by IBM Research. One minute in length, it was made by moving carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, a device that magnifies them 100 million times. These two-atom molecules were moved to create images, which were then saved as individual frames to make the film. The movie was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film in 2013.

Gulp is a 2011 British animated short film by Aardman Animations working with Wieden + Kennedy and filmed on Nokia N8 smart phone, then Nokia's top-of-the-range. It is considered a spiritual successor to another Aardman short, Dot. Gulp was filmed "on the world’s largest stop-motion set". The film run-time is under two minutes, and is followed by a behind-the-scenes featurette. The co-directors were Will Studd and Sumo Science.

Down and Out is a 1977 short film created by Aardman Animations. It is part of the Animated Conversations series. In this short, creators David Sproxton and Peter Lord "applied the groundbreaking technique of using recorded conversations of real people as the basis for the script".

Sunrise Productions is a South African computer animation studio based in Cape Town. Notable productions include Jungle Beat, a computer-animated series and its spin-off shows Munki and Trunk and The Explorers.

Aardman Animations is an animation studio in Bristol, England that produces stop motion and computer-animated features, shorts, TV series and adverts.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Aardman & Nokia Make "Dot," the World's Smallest Film". Forbes .
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Marketing Week | marketing news, opinion, trends and jobs".
  3. "Aardman Animation's "Dot" Wins Webby Award". 13 June 2011.