Dominoes Everywhere
April 24, 2009
Some quick facts about the video
- 3,000 dominoes topple over (an extra 2,000 were used for stairs and flooring on carpet).
- No part of the video is computer generated or animated. All of the shots were set up using actual dominoes and then edited for continuity.
- The cardboard man at the beginning was the president of RIT at the time of filming. He created Imagine RIT, which I created the video to promote.
- Pre-production was done over three months.
- Final filming took four nights. The video is divided up into sections, so in a single night that section’s dominoes were set up and filmed. Night 3 was initially the ending, but I didn’t like how it looked, so spent a 4th night creating an better ending.
- Inspiration for the video came from a few different sources:
- Sony Bravia’s Bouncy Balls and Paint commercials
- Honda Cog commercial
- Guinness Tipping Point commercial
- FlippyCat’s domino videos
- The copier shot was accomplished by timing the printout to occur when the dominoes hit the side of the printer. The dominoes don’t actually hit a switch that starts the printer.
- One camera was used. This meant dominoes were set up multiple times throughout each shoot.
- A week after it was upload (a day before the festival that the video promotes), the video had been viewed more than 7,000 times. Those views were almost exclusively from the RIT community. Soon after, the video started appearing on sites around the world. First, Fubiz.net, then Noquedanblogs.com, then NotCot.org where it was discovered by Mark Hoppus from the pop punk band Blink-182 who posted about it on his own site. The views skyrocketed.
