How Hevesh5 Builds Amazing Domino Chain Reactions | WIRED

people just like watching things fall for some reason it's almost hypnotizing my name is lily hevish and i am a domino artist which means i set up thousands of dominoes in intricate arrangements and patterns and then i knock them down lily is the most popular domino artist on youtube with 2 million subscribers and half a billion views perfect yes but not everybody gets it i get a lot of comments on youtube someone will be like domino's that's not an art form anyone can do that they don't understand what goes into a domino's setup behind every successful project is a lot of painstaking work over the past decade she's spent thousands of hours building projects like these elaborate domino chains that have made fans out of celebrities set multiple records and earned her a massive online following but even with all that experience each project carries the same risk you know it's going to knock down at some points and you just have to learn how to deal with that and get past and keep rebuilding keep doing it even if it fails she calls her favorite project the amazing triple spiral it took eight days and fifteen thousand dominoes to set up lily also works on teams she was one of two leads on this massive setup which took 19 builders 250 000 dominoes and a full week to construct from start to finish it fell for an astonishing 12 minutes and 39 seconds and broke three records including largest overall domino project in america when i'm building it's like i'm almost in a trance and i like get into the zone of where i could just focus on the dominoes and create something that i think of and make it come to life some people are like very square and geometric with their lines kind of like free-form and i like go all over the place with my setups and i think that's why people like it because they can always be surprised by what's gonna come next [Music] and dominoes aren't the only ingredient she also mixes in rube goldberg-like tricks which allow even more opportunities to think in three dimensions to start a project lily first decides which elements to build around so there's a lot of names for different tricks the most standard ones are the domino line domino curve a domino field tower wall pyramid there's a lot of tricks i do all the structures first so that's like the walls the towers and in case one of those towers falls by accident it won't knock down or other things around it and then after i do all the structures i do all the flat projects which is the fields the lines the turns this is a direction changer so when the clear domino hits the top of it it'll spin and then it'll hit the yellow one and make it go in a 90 degree angle and then i connect it all with a single domino line i think the main thing is just being calm and precise so there are two main ways for a project to fail one is if the chain gets stuck and doesn't fall all the way through in one take and then of course there are accidental falls yeah i've knocked it down by accident a couple times as a domino builder you have to learn to get through fails and just try to figure out what failed how to improve it and get better to avoid accidental knockdowns she uses a fail-safe technique as i'm building i make safety gaps by taking out like five dominoes here and there and if i knock it down by accident it'll stop at that gap so it doesn't knock down the whole thing gotta be super super careful and especially because i'm like in this setup right now filling in safety gaps is probably the most stressful part of it because if you knock it down it could knock down the whole thing so it's pretty tense after her first viral video in 2013 it became clear that this was no longer just a hobby domino art is my full-time job currently right now i'm traveling around the world doing projects for companies who want their logo done in dominoes i've done commercials and different things for ad agencies to recreate images from pop culture or logos like this she starts on her computer so when i do a picture out of domino's first i'll find the image online and then there's a computer program on microsoft excel where you put the image that you found online beneath the cells and it'll actually convert the cells into a domino pixel then she prints out a step-by-step guide on how to recreate the image in domino form so it'll say like row one three white four black and then you know exactly how many dominoes to actually make the image and then i set up cameras and i knock it down lily posts a new video every saturday it takes up so much of her time that she's actually decided to take a break from college to focus on her career my youtube channel is doing so well i'm getting a lot of inquiries i'm able to sustain myself and i don't really need a degree to do what i'm doing if i want to go back to college in the future i can that's always an option but i already have the job that i want the best part for me is seeing something that i worked so hard on work all the way through after sometimes even spending weeks planning and building it i finally get to see the payoff when i knock it down and when i see that last domino fall that's like the best part like that's what i live for

Channel: WIRED

Views: 20,746,428

Keywords: dominos, ott obsessed, rube goldberg, dominoes, youtubers making money, domino art, domino structure, domino chain, lily hevesh, hevesh5, youtube art, hevesh5 dominoes, hevesh5 domino, hevesh5 world record, hevesh5 video, hevesh5 domino video, hevesh dominos, hevesh5 dominos, hevesh5 dominos video, hevesh5 agt, hevesh domino, knocking down dominos, lily hevesh domino, chain reaction, domino chain reactions, hevesh, wired

Id: u5GIh076hp0

Length: 5min 53sec (353 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018