Before the brief:

So we were asked to pick a narrative, and i chose the narrative of Cinderella, the Grimm Brother’s version. I liked Cinderella as a child, but as I grew I liked the disturbing version that was in the original text. This included the step sisters cutting their feet and getting their eyes pecked by birds. I felt this was more fun.

The scene i decided to focus on was the shoe fitting, where the prince came to Cinderella’s home with the glass slipper. I liked this scene because this was when the two stepsisters cut their toe and heel so that they could fit into cinderella’s shoe. It was full of “drama” and disturbing imagery which i liked.

After the Brief:

WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN?!?!?!?

Maths & Physics, my worst subjects up to date.

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Researching on who Rube Goldberg was, and how to make the machine. 

After contemplating life about a day, i decided that maybe i should look into the creator of this machine. I wanted to see what were some of his works or traits that i could potentially have a similar interest in, to help me kickstart my project with something I could do.

From here, i learnt that he was a cartoonist. Hey! That something i relate to.It gave me a bit more confidence to start the work because now i knew that whatever that i drew first on the paper did not have to be realistic (yet).  So, i drew a mind map on a whiteboard so that i could see what elements i wanted in my machine:

With that, I also wanted the chopping of the step sister’s feet to be included into the work. all i knew at this point was that something was going to hit my styrofoam foot (here i knew i was going to have to carve the feet out of styrofoam) and the parts would fall off. When I set start the machine, i was advised to have a task at the end. Here, i decided that my finishing task would be a foot sliding into a shoe.

I watched some videos on Rube Goldberg Machines, however i did not find them useful as all the mechanisms were very specific to the task that they had. I did not even have the basic knowledge of putting things together so that it would create a chain reaction, so those videos did not make any sense to me. I even tried to look for online simulations for a goldberg machine, but could not find any.

Researching on Simple Mechanics and putting them together

I decided that i should look into mechanics. i stumbled across a great lecture demonstration programme by the University of California, where there were pdfs on “Science stuff”. (https://www.physics.uci.edu/~demos/mechanics.html)

 

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OKAY WHATEVER, LET ME TRY SOMETHING SIMPLER.

So then i googled Simple Mechanics, which really helped me because this was something that i could actually understand (FINALLY)

The quality of the infographic is bad, but the definitions of the machines and examples given really helped me a lot. From here, i started planning on how to combine these simple mechanics into each other, making something a little bit more complex.

Instead of drawing it out, i could not visualise it in 2D because it did not tell me how things were going to interact with each other. So, for this, I felt that I needed to make a study model to know how it was going to look in 3d.

 

A) An inclined plane that would help me roll my ball down.

B) A pulley so that i could make things go up down up down. i had three because i wanted to “stretch” my machine so i has space to do other mechanics if needed

C) A wheel & axle sort of thing so that an axe could “chop” the toes of the foot when the end is pulled up.

Here, i felt that cardboard would be the most appropriate material for this machine because i could cut it into shapes and sizes that i wanted easily, and could attach and detach them easily with pins during my trials. After so many tries, i was finally able to make something work! With lots of cardboard, sticks, and hot glue, this was the main mechanism that would be in my machine.

After this, i made the same mechanism for the second panel, making the mechanism repeat again. Below is the final structure (without the ramp on the last step). At this point, i was satisfied, so i decided to bring my structure to the 3D Studio because now i could focus on trying to make my mechanism smoother and sculpt the feet.

After discovering my secret skill in carving organic shapes out of styrofoam from the previous project, this did not take so much time, so i was able to carve 3 different feet to represent each girl in quite a short time. i cut the parts of the feet and attached them onto the machine.

I had a lot of trouble with the transition from the first panel to the second panel, where the ball would roll down to trigger the mechanism at the second panel. [Red: the part i had trouble with] [Pink: What the ball is supposed to do after i triggered it].

Initially, i had tried to make it so that when the “axe” hit the stick, it would push a ball that was waiting there, which would trigger the ball to roll down the tramp:

But this did not work. After many trials and errors, i found that i was moving against the nature of the mechanic. I was trying to make the mechanic push something forward, when the mechanic was designed to push something downward. So then, i changed my work and made a seesaw instead, which worked much better than the one i planned.

After even more trials and errors, i managed to get the machine to FINALLY work as intended:

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FINAL

Just for fun, i made my structure to look like a Gothic Period Cinderella castle.

 

Some Takeaways:

• if there had been more time, i would have liked to make my machine smoother.
• i would also liked to play with the element of water, to make my work more gory. The water would have been dyed red. When it was triggered, it would spill out of the step sister’s foot and heel when it was cut off.
• Even though this project was waaaaaay out of my comfort zone, i had fun trying to make things interact with each other, and now i know what a wheel and axle is.

Thank you for reading!