Watch a spectacular scene of 750,000 dominos topple over after a 2-week setup

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Originally published at: Watch a spectacular scene of 750,000 dominos topple over after a 2-week setup | Boing Boing

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So this is the “domino effect”…

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Now that was a Wonderful Thing.

It was like being taken to school on how large displays are done. There were local and global time delay runs to let each major scene finish sequentially, and major scenes are setup in parallel to increase reliability. If a scene has a problem, the run continues through the high-reliability double-wide timing runs. Fascinating to see how it’s all planned and executed. Only a few issues with a couple of scenes. Impressive considering the complexity of some of those stunts. I especially liked the astronaut scene, and the interlaced banners that “faded in”.

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Caption on screen at 17:12 says

“Thumbs up for a new Amateur Domino World Record! :)”

So are there people who make a living doing this?

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yeah, that’s my question too, as on the wikipedia page we see records of more than 750,000s:
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  • Largest rectangular level domino field (1 million tiles)
  • A new record of 4,345,027 tiles

(“so how long a run would require an hour to fall?” well: ‘Fastest topple of 30 metres of domino tiles… 4.21 sec’ → (30*3600)/4.21 → 25.7 kilometers…?)

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I wonder how much kinetic energy is released in total over the whole run, wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually pretty significant added up.

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How do folks acquire 750,000 dominoes to compete with anyway? Do several people pool their collections or what?

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I was wondering about the carbon footprint of 750,000 dominoes. :thinking:

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And, how do they manage not to have a single accidental take out progress. How do they limit the damage of inevitable accidents?

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Before I watched the video, I was thinking of the hundreds of hours spent positioning plastic rectangles so they can fall over - and upon watching the video, thinking, worse, positioning plastic rectangles so they don’t fall over…

I have read about these events where accidents happen that take out days of work before they’re finished, ruining everything…

Everything looks pretty compartmentalized, with the triggering lines of dominoes separated out from everything else (and obviously done - or at least connected up - last).

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As you set up, you leave periodic gaps to limit damage if there’s an accident. Accidents will happen though, and to a certain degree you will be redoing things. This is where the skill of the team comes in as well. The more of this you’ve done, the fewer accidents you’ll have.

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There’s a second video showing some of the setup. The various parts are not connected until the end, and there’s some other fail safes. The show how one part was mostly saved by some strategically placed dominoes that are taped so they can only fall one way.

Also shows them manually triggering the couple that didn’t topple.

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By killing the sparrow.

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That’s even better than the topple video, thank you.

I would have enjoyed the latter even more if they had had a birds eye camera and would have cut to other footage (maybe: as inset) for the 3D structures. Birds eye of the whole thing, that would be great also. But who am I to complain, I can’t even set up 100 dominoes in a row…

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Wow, thanks for sharing. I didn’t realize how much I needed to see them topple the remaining parts by hand. Especially the bookcase and the duck pond. :sweat_smile:

Super cool to see all the tools (even special software!!) they use for setups like this.

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