Hamster Phone Charger. Charging Your Nokia with a Hamster.

Non è la tecnologia. È come la usi tu. Ciao. Mi chiamo Peter Ash. È mia l'idea del progetto GCSE. A casa, una sera, il criceto di mia sorella correva sulla ruota, così sono tornato al college e mi sono inventato il caricabatterie per telefono cellulare azionato da un criceto. In realtà è piuttosto semplice. Il criceto corre sulla ruota. Poi passa attraverso il sistema di ingranaggi, la circuiteria e ricarica il tuo telefono cellulare. Una volta ho ricevuto dall'America un'email in cui si diceva "potete mettere a punto una nuova versione più grande per il mio cavallo"? Ci vuole un sacco di potenza per alimentare una casa. In effetti non è molto pratico, e neppure tutto il disordine che si crea. You put one character in that’s in one pose. You take the frame. You take that character out and then replace it with another character in another pose. Animating everyday, I think I’m probably making about 4 seconds a day. When we were asked, if the puppet could be about 9mm tall it was obvious it couldn't be made in the conventional way. So we started thinking about printing techniques – and maybe we could print in 3D. What a 3D printer does is, instead of laying down ink in one level, it lays down a resin and instead of just having one layer of ink, you have several thousand layers of resin, gradually building up. They’re designed in two dimensions, on a piece of paper. Then we give those 2D designs to the 3D modeler. And then they come back from the 3D printers like this. Then when we’ve got the puppet off the rigging that supports it, we stick them onto some very fine wire, and set about painting dot. What I have to do is stop talking, stop breathing for a couple seconds. The scale we’re working at [means] we are really just within the realms of possibility really. You can’t actually print any smaller than this without the heads not forming or the wrists not forming. We rigged the hair as well so you get a sense of momentum as she runs along. There’s been a foot that’s come off. We’ve lost a head [Lost the head] quite early on. An arm… For this film we had to build our own Cellscope to fit the Nokia N8 and it was built by our engineer, Lew. As you see this is a Cellscope, where the only point of focus is actually on the glass so there’s no requirement for any depth of field. Whereas our problem was that we wanted a little bit of depth of field because of the models. So that’s why ours is different. We retrofitted a 1930s rostrum base with motors so that we could make tiny increments that a computer controlled. Here’s our background. Here’s our set and you can see above it we have our camera which is mounted here, and our Nokia phone here with our Cellscope. But to follow Dot we start here and the set moves underneath the camera. That’s where the precision bit comes in - the precision mechanical engineering - when it goes back to the start, it has to be frame perfect. 0:04:35.0,0:04:41.0 We use the full [resolution] images which come from the actual phone camera itself, which we used for the final film. So we just showed you Dot on a bee, and we can see there was a big bar going into her head. What I get off the animation floor is that, and then we use what’s called a backplate to digitally remove it. This has actually been one of the trickiest jobs to de-rig I’ve ever actually tackled. We’ve just hit a thousand frames and Dot is here. She’s holding up, she’s holding up. I’m being pretty careful with her, but she’s still got a long way to go on her journey so we’ll wait and see!