IBM has made a stop-motion film—A Boy and His Atom—using individual molecules as pixels, in what Guinness has acknowledged is the world's smallest movie.

The movie's plot line depicts a character called Atom who befriends a single atom and goes on a "playful journey." This journey involves dancing, jumping on a trampoline, and playing catch. It's unlikely to win any Oscars, but that's not really the point; it's designed to get people inspired about science.

IBM moved the molecules using two of its own scanning tunnelling microscopes. It's a huge machine that weighs two tons, operates at minus 268 degrees Celsius and magnifies atoms—placed on a copper surface—by 100 million times. The machine moved around 5,000 carbon monoxide molecules to create the movie. Each time the molecules were arranged in the right way, the IBM team rendered a still image to create each of the 242 frames. In those frames, you can only see one atom or pixel because you look at it from above. It took roughly 10 days of 18-hour shifts to get each frame right.

The machine itself is operated via a standard computer and the atoms are manipulated by a super sharp needle that can "feel" atoms. The needle can be used to physically attract atoms and molecules (using an electrical current) on the surface and then pull them into a particular location. This process makes a unique, scratchy sound called an "atomic short" which indicates to researchers how far the atoms have moved.

This is important because atoms can't be filmed while they are being moved, so the sound is a critical indicator for the research team to assess whether the atom has been moved to the right slot. The noise is created as the atom is dragged between two binding sites—when it finds itself between two positions like this, the current changes, and this generates the sound that researchers play through speakers as an aural guide.

The research team has developed this technology for exploring how to use atoms to improve computation and data storage in accordance with Moore's Law. Using the same technology the team also created the world's smallest magnetic bit—using just 12 atoms to reliably store one bit of magnetic information, compared with approximately a million atoms it takes to store a bit of data on a modern electronic device.

Andreas Heinrich, principal investigator, IBM Research, said: "Research means asking questions beyond those required to find good short-term engineering solutions to problems. As data creation and consumption continue to get bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level. We're applying the same techniques used to come up with new computing architectures and alternative ways to store data to making this movie."

Guinness has certified the movie as the World's Smallest Stop Motion Film.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.