Of dominoes, falling objects and such

I don't know about you, but I've always been fascinated by the incredibly complex structures people build up out of dominoes - only to destroy them within seconds (or minutes, for the really big ones) just for the fun of seeing them fall.

Even more fascinating is the extension of this idea to all sorts of other objects. It's become really big business in the advertising industry. I thought a few illustrations of the genre might be fun for all of us (I've certainly enjoyed watching them again while compiling this post!).

First, ye olde private effort. This is from a French TV program combining falling dominoes with billiards.





Fun, isn't it? This is another private venture, trying to get the 'falling domino' effect using Diet Coke and Mentos:





Lots of TV programs have adopted the theme. There's a Japanese program that constantly comes up with new ways to knock things over in sequence - you'll find a lot of it on YouTube. I like this one, where the BBC program 'Blue Peter' set a new record for using CD's and DVD's in a domino-style knockdown:





Now to the commercial effect. One of the very best of the genre was made for the Honda Accord:





Miller Beer got into the act as well, using human 'dominoes':





However, the pièce de resistance has got to be the latest Guinness advert. This was shot in a remote village called Iruya in the Argentine Andes. It's thousands of feet high with a local population of only a thousand or so - and none of them had ever seen anything like it! The production team spent about $20 million to make it. They used 26 trucks to haul their gear and set up 6,000 dominoes, 10,000 books, 70 wardrobes, 50 fridges, 400 tires and 6 cars for the falling sequences. There's a good article about it in the Daily Mail newspaper.

I have two clips for you. If you're in a hurry, the first one shows the advert alone and is about one and a half minutes long. However, the second is much more interesting. It's a 'making of' feature, showing how they did it, and followed by the advert itself. It takes about nine minutes, but to my mind is worth the investment of time. Who thought this up, anyway?








If any of you are wondering why I enjoy this nonsense, I'm sorry . . . put it down to the little boy in me!

Peter