Stamps that move

The world's "smallest and shortest film" appears on a new lenticular stamp that has been created for the dutch postal service TNT. KesselsKramer askes director Anton Corrbijn to shoot the one second film, which features actress Carice van Houten.

The Amsterdam and London based agency were commissioned to develop new innovations in stamps and the result is a small lenticular stamp that contains 30 frames of film. 350,000 have been printed from Dutch post offices. 

Lenticular Thunderbirds Stamps Are Go!

GBH in London are also about to launch a whole Thunderbirds inspired lenticular set for the Royal Mail. You can watch the stamps below:

And as part of the special edition pack who better than Brains himself to take fans through how the stamps were made.

"The stamps were created by GBH with a process that fused film-making, editing and post production techniques with graphic design," runs the write-up that also appears on GBH's blog.

"Sequences were meticulously trialled from the original master 35mm print at ITV, and the final frames were carefully selected, exported to HD quality, digitally re-mastered and then re-edited back into an all-new 36 frames sequence, for use in the complex micro-lenticular process."

The lenticular stamps are joined by a Royal Mail Special Stamp Issue of six landscape stamps featuring all of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation TV shows from the 1960s: Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and Joe 90:

"The stamp format allows the full 35mm frame to be shown exactly as it was shot by Gerry Anderson for the first time, as it was cropped to 4:3 when originally aired on British TV," say GBH, who have been clearly been meticulous about the detailing here.

Indeed, the presentation pack for the stamps features a special pull-out four-page comic telling the story of the creation of the Thunderbirds through the illustrations of original TV21 comic artist, Gerry Embleton, with text by Stephen La Riviere. Part of the pack also looks at the design of the Captain Scarlet puppet:

The stamps, micro-lenticular mini-sheet and all collectible products are available for pre-order from Royal Mail now and will officially launch on January 11 2011.