0.157 mm high
This elephant sculpture is
The size of a speck of dust
The smallest animal sculpture is
“Fragile Giant”
Guinness World Records, 2015
Microscope
With a one-of-a-kind
ENDANGERED Elephants
African elephant populations have fallen from an estimated 12 million a century ago to some 400,000
These nano sculptures are extensively cited in academic publications around the world
Featured on the cover of the
Journal of Advanced Materials
Vol 8 | No 9 | March 2 | 2016
Created using quantum physics
Multiphoton Lithography
Ground-breaking film created in a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)
This revolutionary filming technique draws on the early days of the film industry. Using Stop Frame Photography to painstakingly create moving image.
Using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at high magnification, hundreds of images of the nano sculpture were captured as a Piezo stage was rotated to a precision of below one ten-thousandth of a degree. Each individual frame in the sequence can take several minutes to capture (depending on resolution), meaning that one second of film can take up to 4 hours to film. A painstakingly detaile d process, in which any micro-blip means starting again from scratch. This is all done with a ground-breaking optical system developed by Stefan Diller, Wuerzburg, Germany called Nanoflight.Creator. The only system in the world capable of SEM film.
An SEM does not use photons (normal light) to capture an image. The wavelength of light is too large to capture the details in the Elephant. Electrons are focused on to the elephant, which is coated in gold and rebounds are measured, forming a “picture” based on the reflection intensity of the electrons.
The effect of this from a filmic perspective is that one is not operating in an environment of light. Shadows and “colour” behave differently and at this quantum level, and our traditional expectations of light have to be thrown out the window. All manageable for a single picture, but when compositing thousands of individual photographs, it becomes a different story completely. A series of techniques and technologies drawn from the special effects world needs to be applied in post-production to create a stable film.
In summary, the creation of this film involves a wonderfully diverse set of creative energies, from bespoke electronics and software to quantum physics and leading-edge scientific tool to modern special effects. A feat of art and science at its most beautiful.
Each frame from this film will be minted as an NFT
