As we’ve seen in The Fountain, The Tree of Life and even this year’s Upstream Color, filmmakers can use microscopic scope to invite us into beautiful worlds beyond our imagination. For a new short film, some IBM nanophysicists have now engineered atoms to create a the world’s smallest movie — certified as a Guinness World Record.

Using scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, the result is A Boy and His Atom, a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. With a hat tip from Hollywood.com, one can see the impressive results below with both the full short and a making of video.

But before we get to that, we’ve also got word on a film of the exact opposite variety. According to reports, Japanese public broadcaster NHK will premiere the very first 8K Super Hi-Vision narrative film at the 66th Cannes Film Festival this month. Directed by Toshio Lee, it’s not an action spectacle, rather a comedy titled Beauties À La Carte. Set to screen on May 16th and 17th, it will showcase a resolution of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels, four times the resolution of 4K and 16 times that of HD. Check out the aforementioned videos below, followed by the first still from Lee’s film, which could very well pave the wave for use in Hollywood.

Do you think either of these technologies could permeate Hollywood?

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