Rolling Ball Sculptures in Movies and Television
Updated: Aug 24
Why Rolling Ball Sculptures Work So Well in Movies and Television
Rolling ball sculptures seem almost made for movies and television. Once a ball starts moving, your eye naturally follows it. You want to see where it goes, what it hits and what happens next. Over the years, rolling ball sculptures, marble machines and other ball-driven contraptions have appeared in movies, television shows, opening credits and even game-show challenges.
I've had the fun of seeing my own work on television a couple of times. One of my desktop rolling ball sculptures appeared on CSI: NY, and a few years later I built several of the rolling ball track sections used in the opening credits of Elementary. Those experiences also made me pay a little more attention whenever a rolling ball machine showed up on screen.
Sesame Street and My Earliest Memories of Rolling Balls
I grew up in the late 1970s and early '80s watching Sesame Street every day. It was a big part of my childhood, and I still remember it very fondly. There were certain recurring clips I especially looked forward to, and strangely enough, two that have stayed with me for nearly 50 years involved balls traveling through elaborate paths.
One was the animated Pinball Number Count. A pinball traveled through a colorful series of situations while an incredibly catchy song counted its way from 1 to 12. If the goal was to teach kids to count to 12, it certainly worked on me. I can still hear "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12" in my head today. It may have been one of my earliest earworms. Watching it again brings me right back to sitting in the living room with milk and graham crackers, soaking up the music and visuals.
But there was another Sesame Street sequence that fascinated me even more because this one was real. It featured a tall rolling ball machine built on what looked like railroad-bridge scaffolding, with metal tracks running throughout it. The camera followed the ball as it rolled away from you, toward you and across the screen. Along the way it passed through and around different props, jumped into a basket, rolled into a little cart that dumped it onto the next section, and traveled through spinners, catches and other mechanisms that looked impossibly complicated to my young mind.
I knew it wasn't animation. Somebody had actually built this thing. I had no idea how they had done it, and at that age I certainly didn't appreciate how much work must have gone into getting all of those little actions to happen correctly. That was part of what made it seem like magic.
The run eventually ended with three cherries dropping out of a box and landing on the whipped cream of three ice cream sundaes. As fascinated as I was by the machine, I also remember being slightly envious of the little girl at the end who got to eat the cherry.
I recently watched the clip again, and now I see it with completely different eyes. Instead of simply following the ball, I'm looking at the construction, trying to identify the materials and studying how the different mechanisms were made. What looked like one miraculous continuous run when I was a child I now look at as a fabricator. I can see places that probably took several attempts to get right, and I know that clever camera work and editing could make a difficult sequence much easier to film.
Over the years I've independently built versions of most of the same kinds of elements that fascinated me in that old Sesame Street machine. I never consciously thought back to it while designing my own rolling ball sculptures, though. By the time I started building them full time I was almost 30, and it was an old childhood memory. Spacewarp was the thing that directly sent me down the path toward building rolling ball sculptures.
Still, I have to believe those Sesame Street sequences had some subconscious effect on me. I was completely drawn to watching that ball follow its path, jump through the air and interact with one mechanism after another. I can't draw a straight line from that machine to the work I make today, but nearly 50 years later I still get an emotional response when I see it.
Maybe that's the best evidence that it left an impression.
Spacewarp and The Family Game
A different kind of rolling ball machine appeared in the 1983 Japanese film The Family Game. The movie featured Spacewarp, a build-it-yourself rolling ball roller coaster using steel balls and flexible plastic track. Spacewarp isn't really a rolling ball sculpture in the same sense as the kinetic artwork I build, but it certainly shares some of the same DNA.
The appearance apparently did Spacewarp quite a favor. Following the release of The Family Game, the toy became extremely popular in Japan, with approximately one million sets sold during 1983 and 1984.
The Rolling Ball Sculptures in Fracture
Probably the best-known appearance of a rolling ball sculpture in a movie is Fracture, the 2007 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer, and the complicated kinetic machines fit his character perfectly. They're precise, mechanical and intricate, and the balls seem to be constantly working their way through some elaborate plan.
The rolling ball sculptures in Fracture were based on the work of Dutch kinetic artist Mark Bischof. Bischof says his work was used as the model for the film and that he provided recommendations, although he wasn't physically involved in constructing the reproductions made in Hollywood.
I had already been building rolling ball sculptures professionally for several years when Fracture came out, and suddenly I started hearing from people who had seen the movie. For the next several years I regularly received inquiries asking if I could build "the ball machine from Fracture." Most didn't know what the thing they had just seen was actually called. They searched for an Anthony Hopkins ball machine, marble machine, kinetic sculpture, marble run or simply tried to describe the contraption from the movie.
I couldn't reproduce Bischof's sculptures - nor would I copy another artist's work - but I could build something with the same basic appeal in my own style. Fracture unintentionally became a pretty good advertisement for rolling ball sculpture in general, and by extension, for me. It introduced a lot of people to an art form they hadn't known existed.
Survivor Turns a Rolling Ball Track Into a Game
Survivor took the concept in another direction with a recurring challenge called Simmotion. Contestants place a ball into a metal chute where it travels down a long spiraling track before emerging from one of two exits. A turnstile inside the machine alternates which exit the ball takes. The contestant has to catch it and immediately put it back into the top. Additional balls are gradually added until keeping track of all of them becomes increasingly difficult. Drop one and you're out.
Simmotion isn't a rolling ball sculpture, but anyone familiar with them will immediately recognize the similarities. Gravity powers the ball, the track determines its path and the mechanism controls where it goes. More importantly, there's that same anticipation as you wait for the ball to reappear. In a rolling ball sculpture it's entertaining. On Survivor, apparently they decided it would be more fun if losing track of the ball cost you a million dollars.
My Desktop Rolling Ball Sculpture on CSI: NY
In 2010, I received an inquiry through my website from CSI: NY. They wanted to purchase a small hand-powered desktop rolling ball sculpture to use in an episode. I knew it was going to be on CSI, but I had no idea how they planned to use it.
It ended up in the episode: Season 6, Episode 22, “Point of View”
The sculpture was Desktop #59, one of my fairly basic desktop designs. It didn't have a motor or automatic ball lift. The marbles were loaded into the top and released using a hand-operated lever. I shipped it off to the production, they purchased it outright, and I never saw it again.
A few months later the episode aired and I went looking for my sculpture. I had hoped somebody might actually operate it on screen, but its television career turned out to be considerably less glamorous. Gary Sinise's character goes to a dresser to retrieve his gun from the top drawer, and there, sitting on top of the dresser, is my rolling ball sculpture.
For a few seconds.
It was genuinely great to see something I'd made appear on a network television show, although I have to admit it was also a little bit of a let-down. It was simply being used as a prop and nobody interacted with it. Rolling ball sculpture wasn't mentioned, there were no identifying marks visible, and unsurprisingly I didn't see any noticeable increase in website traffic or inquiries afterward.
Another kinetic artist had work featured in the same episode. I knew beforehand that someone else's machine was going to be used, but I didn't know who the artist was until after the episode aired. It turned out to be Phil Klingler and his Ball Chain Machine. That at least introduced me to another artist working with kinetic machinery.
I wasn't a CSI viewer before this happened, and I didn't become one afterward. I'm not much of a television watcher in general. But I did hunt down that particular episode just to see my few seconds of fame.
Building the Rolling Ball Tracks for Elementary
My involvement with Elementary was considerably different.
I was contacted through my website by a production company working on the opening credits for a new television series. They told me immediately that the pieces were for an opening title sequence, but they were very quiet about what show they were making. I wouldn't find that out until a couple of months later.
They had a general list of things they wanted: a spiral, a large spinning arm, some different track sections and a mechanism involving gears, sprockets and chain. Beyond those requests, they mostly left me alone to figure out how to build everything.
Unlike one of my normal rolling ball sculptures, these pieces weren't intended to connect to one another. They were individual mechanisms made specifically to be filmed as short sequences and then edited together.
One was a zig-zag arrangement where the balls dropped from one short section of track to the next. Another was a tipping arm that spun around and threw the ball backward onto another track. I built a large spinning arm that continued rotating after the ball had already moved on, along with a flat spiral. I also made a mechanism using three sprockets spaced apart with chain wrapped around them in a Z pattern. The sprocket-and-chain section had been specifically requested, but in the grand tradition of television production, it didn't make the finished credits.
At the same time, I happened to be building a large 6-foot by 6-foot commissioned rolling ball sculpture for a private customer. The production wanted that as well, so I shipped the entire sculpture to Florida for filming and they shipped it back afterward. They filmed one of its flat spirals with the rest of the large sculpture visible out of focus in the background. It's very difficult to see in the finished credits unless you already know what you're looking for.
The individual mechanisms were simple and didn't require the kind of endless testing that goes into one of my complete sculptures. They only needed to perform their particular action reliably for the camera. I built the pieces, shipped everything to Florida and never went to the shoot myself.
A couple of months later I finally learned that the show was Elementary, the modern Sherlock Holmes series starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu. I searched it out specifically to see what they had done with my work.
The finished opening credits have a wonderful Mouse Trap or Rube Goldberg machine feel. My individual pieces appear as snippets within a much larger sequence, edited together with other mechanisms so everything appears to be part of one elaborate machine. That was exactly what the title designers intended: Prologue, the company behind the sequence, says it commissioned five standalone pieces from Rolling Ball Sculptures and combined them with other handmade mechanisms for the 30-second opening.
I was extremely proud when I finally saw it. Unlike my few seconds of anonymous set dressing on CSI: NY, the mechanisms I'd built were actually doing what they were made to do and had become part of the identity of the show. It was fun to watch every time.
I did see some website traffic from the Elementary opening credits, although because I hadn't built one complete sculpture that viewers could purchase or commission, it was probably more valuable as bragging rights than as a direct sales pitch.
It also reinforced something else I'd learned from the handful of television-related jobs that came my way over the years: apparently every production company discovers that it needs custom fabrication immediately before it needs custom fabrication. "Can you have this done yesterday?" seems to be a fairly standard part of the television workflow.
"Simply Irresistible"
In the 1999 romantic comedy Simply Irresistible, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sean Patrick Flanery, a small rolling-ball-style Rube Goldberg machine appears in the restaurant as a wonderfully overcomplicated way to make a martini. The sequence begins when a small marble is released into the machine and travels through the mechanism, eventually triggering a liquor bottle mounted on a pivot so it tips and pours into the glass. The chain of mechanical actions finishes by dropping an olive into the martini. It is a brief scene, but the machine is a great example of the same kind of cause-and-effect motion that makes rolling ball sculptures so entertaining - using gravity, timing and a series of simple mechanical actions to turn an ordinary task into something much more fun to watch.
Fast forward to about 15:55 to see it in action:
Why Rolling Ball Machines Work So Well on Screen
Looking at all these examples, I think the appeal is pretty simple. Movement catches your eye, and a rolling ball gives you something specific to follow. You don't need to understand the machine or know anything about kinetic art. The ball disappears into a spiral, triggers an arm, drops onto another track or vanishes somewhere inside the mechanism, and you wait to see what happens next.
That's why the same basic idea can work in so many different ways. Sesame Street used a rolling ball to help teach children. Fracture used elaborate kinetic machinery to complement a meticulous and mechanically minded character. Survivor turned it into a test of concentration. Elementary used a chain of mechanical events to help establish the complicated, problem-solving world of Sherlock Holmes.
Sometimes it's art. Sometimes it's a prop. Sometimes it's a game. And sometimes it's five unrelated pieces of stainless steel track that somebody edits together until they look like one giant machine.
Whatever form it takes, once somebody drops the ball, it's awfully hard not to watch where it goes. If I've missed something... send me a note! I will add it to this page.
