The press of a button triggers a chain reaction built to launch a single dib across my room and into my mouth!

Don’t believe it worked straight through? Watch my no cut version above. Over the summer of 2008, I saw commercials for a Dibs video competition. The competition was called the Dibs Bite-Sized Film Fest and the goal was to produce a 30/45 second promotional video for Dibs.  The prize: $10,000! I had to do the competition, but I didn’t have any ideas for my commercial. At the same time I wanted to enter the competition, I also wanted to build another Rube Goldberg machine like the Rube Goldberg from the previous summer. Then an idea came to mind. I could build a Rube Goldberg for the Dibs Film Fest! I was off to kill two birds with one stone.

The only problem was that I wanted this Rube Goldberg to be longer and more complicated than the 2007 Rube Goldberg. How could I do that in only 45 seconds? I decided to make the Rube Goldberg my main project and then I could edit it to be 45 seconds for the competition. I ended up with a 2.5 minute Rube Goldberg and managed to speed up the footage to make it 45 seconds. I also did a little reconstruction on the machine to shorten it for the competition.

So I submitted the video below as my entry to the competition and waited for the results. After the public voting, my video made the top ten out of the hundreds of entries. Soon after, judges would vote for the winner. I had to wait some more.

And the winner was… some other video. I watched the winning video and I’ll give it the credit. It was very funny and deserved to win. I looked for the video again (two years later) but couldn’t find it on the interwebs. If I do, I’ll post the link here.

Though I did not win the $10,000 prize, I ended up with a pretty awesome video and an iPod nano (top ten got iPods. Hellz yeah). To my amazement the Rube Goldberg machine worked straight through, completing the task it was built to perform. It definitely beat the the 2007 Rube Goldberg with its complexity and creativity. What do you think? Which one do you like better?