Building the Hearthstone Boomsday Rube Goldberg Machine
In August 2018, I got a phone call from Adam Sadowsky, who ran Syyn Labs in Los Angeles. Adam and I had worked together on several projects before, beginning with a large Wonka machine that was built for the Wonka candy store window in Times Square. That project involved about three months of me flying to Los Angeles every week, coming home on the weekends, and then spending another 15 days in New York installing everything. It was a fantastic experience, and I always enjoyed working with Adam, so when he called and asked if I had time to come to Los Angeles for another project, I immediately said yes.
The project was for Blizzard Entertainment and Hearthstone to promote the Boomsday "Here comes the Boom" card pack expansion with a huge Rube Goldberg machine. Syyn Labs was running the entire production. They rented the studio, brought together the different people needed to build it and managed the project from beginning to end. That was one of Adam's talents. He knew a lot of creative people with very different skills, and when a project came along, he was very good at figuring out who he needed and getting everyone together in the same place.
I was there because of my rolling ball sculpture experience. My job was basically to get balls from point A to point B and make specific things happen along the way. I didn't have a detailed list of things I needed to build before I arrived. I had them order the stainless-steel rod I normally use, loaded up my TIG welder and headed to Los Angeles. For me, that's about the best kind of project. Show up, see what needs to happen and figure out a creative and reliable way to make it work when I get there.
Building the Machine in Los Angeles
The entire project was built inside a filming studio in Los Angeles. I stayed at an Airbnb and worked on the machine for the final 11 days of the project. Some of the larger portions had already been started before I arrived, including the trampoline section, but I'd estimate that only about 20 percent of the complete machine was built at that point.
The machine occupied an area somewhere around 40 feet by 40 feet, and there were more than 20 people working on different parts of it at the same time. We worked from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. every day. Six o'clock was a pretty firm stopping point because staying later would have resulted in additional charges for the studio.
Syyn Labs had brought in people with all kinds of different specialties, and there was activity everywhere. Some people were building major parts of the machine while others were fabricating, wiring, testing or solving whatever problem had appeared that day. I also ended up making plenty of smaller welded parts that weren't necessarily part of my rolling ball sections. If somebody needed a steel bracket, support or platform, I had a TIG welder sitting there and could make it. I remember fabricating wire platforms inside burning barrels to support burners so the flames would be visible, along with a bunch of other little things I've long since forgotten. And I got very tired of moving that TIG welder and argon bottle around the set.
Designing a Rube Goldberg Machine
There was a storyboard for the entire machine, but I wasn't involved in creating it. That was primarily the work of Zach Umperovitch, who was the creative mind behind the layout of the machine and the major events that needed to happen. This was the first time I'd met Zach. He picked me up every morning, drove me to the studio and took me back to my Airbnb at the end of the day. We've remained friends ever since, although we haven't had an opportunity to work on another project together.
Zach knew what needed to happen at different points in the sequence, while I figured out how to make the rolling-ball portions connect those events. I needed to move balls up, down and across the set, slow them down when necessary, hit switches, pull levers and deliver them to the next part of the machine with the right speed and timing.
That really isn't all that different from building one of my rolling ball sculptures. The scale and purpose were different, but I was still working with gravity, momentum, timing and mechanical movement. We also tested constantly while we built. You don't want to finish ten steps of a Rube Goldberg machine and then discover that step three only works half the time.
Starting the Machine With a 2-Inch Steel Ball
My first section was near the beginning of the machine and used a 2-inch solid steel ball. I still have that ball today.
The interesting part was how the ball was released. It wasn't pushed by a person or released by an electronic latch. A speaker began playing, and the vibration from the speaker was enough to nudge the steel ball into motion. From there it traveled more than 10 feet along tracks I built, dropping about three or four feet along the way. Because the track was elevated, I also fabricated tall steel supports from the studio floor to hold everything in position.
At the end of that section, the steel ball activated a drill that spun burning steel wool. The steel wool threw sparks in a wide circle, creating one of the first big visual effects in the machine.
The next problem was timing. The steel wool needed enough time to spin and burn before the machine moved on to the next event. I built a long zig-zag section of track that kept the steel ball traveling for roughly another 15 seconds. Instead of using electronics or a timer, the length and shape of the track created the delay.
At the end of the zig-zag, the ball entered a spiral basket I had built. Dropping into the basket triggered the release of a large block of ice, and the ice started the next part of the sequence.
The Tungsten Ball
The block of ice released a 2-inch tungsten ball. I had worked with plenty of steel balls before, but this thing was in another category. Tungsten is extremely dense, and this was the heaviest 2-inch ball they could get. Unlike a cast steel ball, it had been ground into its spherical shape.
The weight was the reason it was being used. We needed enough force to pull down a handle and rotate a circular stand. That stand carried an oil-soaked burning rag over a series of Bunsen burners, which ignited fuses for the next part of the machine.
This was one of the interesting things about the entire project. The balls weren't just moving through tracks because they looked interesting. Their size, weight and momentum were being used to perform actual mechanical work. A steel ball might have been adequate for one part of the machine, but for this section we needed the much greater weight of tungsten to reliably operate the mechanism.
The Flaming Tennis Ball
The burning mechanism eventually ignited fuses connected to a large, sand filled 4-inch tennis ball to give it extra weight. Once the fuses burned through far enough, the tennis ball was released while it was on fire.
This was where one of my more unusual chain lifts came into the project. I built a circular track that carried the flaming tennis ball down into a chain lift. The lift then carried the still-burning ball approximately nine feet into the air. At the top it was released into a series of five trampolines that Zach had set up. The ball bounced from trampoline to trampoline while still burning.
After the final trampoline, the ball was caught by a long arm that worked like a catapult and lifted it about 6 feet into the air. I needed to catch it at its apex and send it into the next part of the machine, so I built a basket that captured the flaming ball and directed it into a tall aquarium, probably around 20 gallons.
The tall aquarium was filled with soapy water with propane being bubbled through it from below. The propane was trapped inside the soap bubbles, so when the flaming tennis ball entered the tank, the bubbles ignited and produced a large burst of flame above the aquarium. The tennis ball itself was extinguished by the water.
The upward pressure from that burst of flame pushed on a levered sheet-metal arm that then released a bowling ball. It was a pretty entertaining day at work.
Bowling Balls, Flags and a Flamethrower
The bowling ball traveled down a much larger set of tracks made from conduit. As it rolled, it knocked over a series of flags displaying Hearthstone images, then dropped into another section and continued across another 8 feet until it activated a flamethrower.
That was essentially the end of my part of the sequence, although during the build there was never a point where everyone simply stayed in their assigned little area. We were all trying to get one enormous machine working, so if something needed to be fabricated, adjusted or tested, whoever had the appropriate skills helped get it done.
That was one of the things I enjoyed most about working on Syyn Labs projects. There were a lot of talented people in the same room doing very different things, and everyone was trying to solve their particular piece of a much larger mechanical puzzle.
Testing the Hearthstone Boomsday Rube Goldberg Machine
We tested constantly throughout construction. As soon as something was built, we wanted to know whether it worked before adding more mechanisms after it. That's exactly how I build a rolling ball sculpture in my own shop. I run a ball through a section, see how it behaves and make adjustments before moving on.
The difference with the Hearthstone machine was that eventually everything had to work together in one continuous take. This wasn't a case where we could film one section, stop, reset and then film the next section to make it look continuous. It was a Rube Goldberg machine, and the complete sequence needed to work from beginning to end.
Considering how many things could potentially go wrong, most of the machine worked remarkably well. The problem area during filming was a set of three rockets near the end that were supposed to fire and hit targets. We did several takes, and the rockets were the one part that didn't want to cooperate consistently. In the final run, only one of the three fired correctly, but fortunately it was the important one. It hit its target and activated the final portion of the machine.
Shoot Day
The eleventh day was filming day. The film crew arrived, along with people from Blizzard, and everybody who had built the machine remained on set. We weren't finished just because construction was over. We had to reset everything between takes, turn motors on and off behind the scenes, make adjustments and be ready to fix anything that stopped working.
Resetting a Rube Goldberg machine of this size wasn't exactly pressing a reset button. Every mechanism that had fired, fallen, moved, burned, tipped or released something had to be put back into its starting position before another take could begin.
The Blizzard executives arrived for the shoot and had couches brought in so they could sit and watch everything. The rest of us were running around resetting the machine and getting ready for the next take. I will say they also knew how to feed a production crew. We had catered breakfast every morning and lunch was ordered for us each day. On shoot day there was an enormous buffet with what seemed like a hundred different things spread across the tables. I was responsible for my own dinner, but during the working day nobody was going hungry.
Building While Lakeport Was Being Evacuated
As if the project itself wasn't enough to think about, there was something considerably more serious happening back home.
This was August 2018, and while I was in Los Angeles working on the machine, Lakeport in Northern California was evacuated because of a major wildfire that had gotten very close to town. My then-wife packed up our belongings and pets and evacuated to Sacramento while I was still down in Los Angeles.
So during these long days of building, testing and getting ready for the shoot, I was also getting updates from home and wondering what was going to happen there. Thankfully everything turned out okay for us, but it added a lot of mental stress to an already exhausting 11 days.
By the end of the project I was completely worn out. Twelve-hour days of fabrication are tiring enough without repeatedly dragging a TIG welder and argon bottle around a crowded film set, but it was also incredibly rewarding work. There aren't many jobs where you find yourself building a nine-foot chain lift for a flaming tennis ball one day and helping someone mount burners inside a barrel the next.
And Then They Threw It Away
After all the building and testing, seeing the complete machine finally work for the cameras was exhilarating. More than 20 people had spent days working on different sections, and suddenly all those separate mechanisms were operating together as one enormous machine. Seeing the final video and knowing how much work had gone into everything happening on screen was very cool. Then the shoot ended.
About 15 minutes after the final take, somebody called "Strike!"
I didn't know what that meant, but I found out pretty quickly.
Everyone immediately started tearing the entire set apart. Things were cut up, dismantled and piled in the middle of the studio. Anything that was rented or valuable was saved, people took some things home, and much of everything else went into the dumpster. After spending all that time carefully building and adjusting mechanisms so they worked reliably, it was pretty shocking to watch the whole thing disappear almost immediately.
I didn't take much home. I kept the 2-inch steel ball from the beginning of the machine, and I saved the chain from the lift that had carried the flaming tennis ball. I later reused that chain in other rolling ball sculptures. Zach kept a lot of my track sections, like the zig-zags, that were used in future Rube Goldberg builds at his home.
My Last Project With Adam Sadowsky
The Hearthstone project also ended up being the last project I worked on with Adam. He passed away from cancer the following year.
I had known Adam since our Wonka project and had always enjoyed working with him. His skill wasn't building the individual mechanisms himself. He was exceptionally good at finding people who could do unusual things, bringing them together and giving them the opportunity to figure out how to make an ambitious project actually work.
The Boomsday machine was a good example of that. Zach had the creative vision for how the overall machine would operate, Adam assembled and managed the group of people needed to build it, and more than 20 of us spent those final days making all the individual pieces work together. I could have only said yes when Adam called. He was amazing to work with.
The finished Hearthstone machine was completely different from the rolling ball sculptures I normally build in my shop, but a lot of the skills I use every day were exactly what I needed. I was still controlling the speed and direction of rolling balls, using gravity and momentum to activate mechanisms, building delays into tracks and testing everything repeatedly until it worked reliably. The balls just happened to range from a 2-inch steel ball to a tungsten ball, a flaming tennis ball and eventually a bowling ball, which made for a considerably more interesting week at work.
