Who doesn’t love Rube Goldberg machines? Those improbable contraptions where one moving object sets off another, which then causes another object to move, and on and on until some (usually simple) action is performed. These very silly devices started out as cartoons by Reuben Goldberg in the early 20th century. (The British equivalent were drawn by W. Heath Robinson, and to this day in the UK these devices are known as “Heath Robinson contraptions”.)
Nowadays there are contests to build real-life Rube Goldberg machines, and there’s something fascinating in watching a complicated, creative one perform its tricks. A couple of notable devices have become extremely popular on YouTube:
Honda ad “The Cog”, where parts of a disassembled Honda Accord are used in interesting ways.
Though the ad looks as though it was done in one shot, it was actually done in two separate halves because the studio lacked space to do it in one setup. The halves were stitched together digitally at around the 1:00 min mark (when the muffler is rolling along the floor), but otherwise there is no CG hanky-panky.
Another great example is the brand-new music video “This Too Shall Pass” from the always-creative popsters OK Go (they of the cleverly-choreographed video on treadmills that went viral a couple of years back).
This took three months of preparation and more than 60 takes over two days of filming. The finished video is one single shot using a Steadicam filming a very precisely-timed device (watch how things happen in real time to the music!) covering two floors of a warehouse.
For both the ad and the video, notice how the really fiddly bits that require much delicacy and accuracy are featured up front. This is so if they go wrong (a common occurrence) the filmmakers don’t have to re-set the entire works. Many of those 60+ takes for OK Go’s video were a minute or less.
Added: Here’s a great article at Make Magazine about the nuts and bolts of making the video. Quote:
I think we did that first sequence about 70 times. When we got past the tire, we knew we had a chance. When the piano dropped without triggering the flags or chairs, we started getting excited. If the sledgehammer blew up the TV we were in the home stretch. It was a tense video to film!