Hearthstone Rube Goldberg Machine — Blizzard Entertainment
This may be my favorite project I built with Adam Sadowsky and the crew at Syyn Labs. Adam—who also created the famous OK Go Rube Goldberg video—was hired by Blizzard Entertainment to build a machine for the release of an upcoming card pack for Hearthstone. The idea was to show, in ridiculously complicated physical form, what might be happening behind the scenes when a player plays a card.
Adam assembled a small team of builders for the project, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.
The overall route through the machine had already been planned when I arrived, but there was a wonderful detail: how I got the balls from one point to another was entirely up to me.
Awesome.
I flew to Los Angeles with my TIG welder and hand tools. We spent ten straight days building, adjusting and testing the machine. Day eleven was filming.
The whole sequence begins when the player plays a card on the laptop and the music starts. The card itself was added later in post-production; during filming the laptop screen was blank.
The vibration from a speaker nudges a 2-inch steel ball into motion. I had ground a small groove into the track to hold it in exactly the right starting position. The ball travels around the wall and through a short zig-zag section I built specifically to slow it down. That delay gives the cameraman enough time to physically move around the wall and get into position for the next shot.
The ball then activates a drill holding steel wool. The steel wool ignites and spins in circles, throwing sparks everywhere. I built a long back-and-forth section of track after that to give the drill enough time to keep spinning until the steel wool burns itself out.
During filming, I was hiding directly behind the wall with the drill's kill switch.
When the ball finally drops into a basket, it releases a block of ice—and that's my cue to shut off the drill.
The ice slides down a ramp and hits a switch that activates the gas, sending flames shooting from a row of Bunsen burners. At the same time, the ice releases another 2-inch ball.
Except this ball is tungsten and super heavy.
I built the ramp that sends the tungsten ball downward, where its weight pulls a long rod and spins an arm through the flames. The burning arm then lights a wick holding a large 5-inch tennis ball in place.
When the wick burns through, the tennis ball is released.
And it's on fire.
The burning tennis ball rolls down another section of track I built and circles around to a custom chain lift. The ball is filled with sand, which makes it heavy enough to behave correctly later in the machine—but also makes the motor work pretty hard to lift it.
We gave the lift a little help. The triangular structure with the blue gems has a dropping plate in its center connected by cable and pulley to the ball pickup. As the plate falls, its weight helps the motor haul the sand-filled tennis ball upward.
At the top, the ball drops into a long catapult arm, which throws it onto another section of my track. That track eventually delivers the ball into an aquarium.
Behind the scenes, someone turns on the gas.
Flames heat a large metal paddle above the aquarium, causing it to rise and release a bowling ball. The bowling ball has its own wick, which is ignited off-camera. Now we have a bowling ball on fire, because apparently the flaming sand-filled tennis ball wasn't enough.
The bowling ball rolls down the ramp, activates the drop-down graphics and triggers the cannons.
And that's where my portion of the machine ends.
From there, the bowling ball activates a roofing torch that melts a block of ice. The resulting water fills a container until its weight releases a small car riding on a cable. The car carries an electromagnet holding a large star. Near the end of its journey, the electrical connection is broken and the star drops.
That activates another series of levers, which eventually ignites three rockets aimed at a target. The target throws a huge switch and activates a Tesla coil for the finale.
We got a good run on the second take, which is pretty remarkable for a machine with this many opportunities to fail. We shot several more takes afterward, but we never managed to get all three rockets to fire correctly at the same time. Thankfully, the one rocket that did cooperate hit the target and kept the sequence going. The Tesla coil was real; the dramatic electrical arcs were added later in post-production. The music was also composed specifically for the finished video after filming.
Then came the part I wasn't prepared for.
Strike.
About fifteen minutes after filming ended, the machine we'd just spent eleven days obsessively building and testing started coming apart.
Everything was dismantled. Props went back to the enormous Los Angeles prop warehouse they had come from. We were allowed to take pieces we wanted, and much of what remained ended up in a pile headed for the dumpster.
It was brutal.
I did at least rescue that original 2-inch steel ball. It's still sitting in my shop.
Eleven days to build it. One day to film it. Fifteen minutes later, demolition. Which is guess is pretty standard for that type of production.
This project was completely different from building one of my normal rolling ball sculptures. It was temporary, collaborative, occasionally ridiculous and enormously fun. I was responsible primarily for the ball tracks and mechanisms that moved the various balls through the first half of the machine, while also helping the rest of the team wherever needed.
It remains one of the most exciting projects I've had the opportunity to work on—and I'm very proud to have been part of it.
