[Music]
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter film,
we set out to build a Rube Goldberg machine, inspired by that film
and the amazing world of Harry Potter. We spent the last three months
building, planning and troubleshooting and here we are today and we cannot wait
to show you what this thing can do.
[Music]
The design process for this machine is basically a series of redoing the design
from scratch. When we first got started, we came up
with a very rough idea and concept for each of the reactions.
What scenes we wanted to depict, how they were going to work together
and roughly how we thought we could make the reaction work.
After that, we'd have to sit down and actually draw out a blueprint of what
we're going to build. What are the actual dimensions? How is
this thing going to function? Up until you have the actual product
and the actual reaction built, you don't know what you're going to have
to do to make this thing work. So we're constantly redesigning and
rethinking exactly how we're doing each one of the sections
of the machine, all the way up until the very end.
[Music] What's great about a project like this
is even though this is such a tight small
team, everyone has such a affection for Harry Potter that
we're super invested. Everyone's giving 110%. Everyone wants this to be
as good as it possibly can be.
I think now we have a way to actually make the chess set
play out the last three moves of the chess game
as they appear in the movie. This board which is exactly as it appears,
right before Ron makes his heroic sacrifice,
he moves forward as a knight to save Harry from the queen. And as that
queen comes, that leaves Harry free
to move here and put the king in check. Those are the last three moves of the
chess game in the movie. Unfortunately this is just a mock-up, we haven't built
all the other pieces of the machine yet. But I can't wait, I'm so excited.
Just trying to make sure this ball track works every single time.
Feeling pretty confident! [Music]
Feeling less confident than I was before.
When you're working on a reaction machine this complicated, you're
constantly dealing with a dozen different forces at play,
whether it be gravity, resistance, speed. So when
something isn't working, you have to run through kind of every
single type of option of what exactly is causing this malfunction and
then figure out what sort of change can be made to fix
that problem. [Music]
Take 647.
[Music]
A lot of times if I'm really stuck, I will just
stand and stare at a reaction for minutes at a time, just looking at it
trying to hope some sort of idea will come to my mind.
There is no textbook on how to build something like this. When you're dealing
with certain kinds of problems you just have to sit there
think, trial and error to try to solve what you need to make this thing work right.
[Applause]
[Music]
This is actually what the finale looks like from the back.
So it's a series of different levers and pulleys.
So that the cup moves down exactly this amount,
it spins this wheel the exact right amount so that we
land on the score we want to land on. [Music]
[Music] So we are the day before our final shoot
day. All final preps going in. We have the
lighting team here. We are lighting the stage. We have the camera crew getting
ready. Everyone is prepping and it's very
exciting but also incredibly intimidating
and scary for the build team, who's been working on this project for months,
because we're at the stage now where everything needs to work.
I am worried for my teammates. They put a lot of time and effort into
making things work together. I've seen their
frustration along the way. So fingers crossed
that it goes off without a hitch.
Myself as the cinematographer is the camera operator.
I have to be one with that machine. Mark and I have already walked through it a
couple times. I just have to really be in sync with it
and and follow it and it's just going to be a lot of practice.
But, by the end of the shoot, I'm going to know this thing backwards and front.
We are so close, there's some little fine-tuning, things we're doing,
little adjustments, but we are right there. I can feel it, I can feel it! We're
gonna, we're gonna get it. We're getting it tonight,
this is happening, super exciting.
Don't miss the official Harry Potter Rube Goldberg machine video now
on watchmojo and find out more about the products we use in our machine
in the info below.