Behind the Scenes of Our Holiday Card

Though many of us consider ourselves mad scientists, we had to hire a real one to help us build the Rube Goldberg machine in this year's holiday card. (A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. For more information, check out Wikipedia or the official Rube Goldberg website.)

Our machine was built by Zach Umperovitch, or as we like to call him, our Rube Goldberg savant. Zach has been building Rube Goldberg machines since he was three, led the Rube Goldberg team at Purdue University for six years, and holds two Guinness World Records for the longest machine ever built. He has worked with Syyn Labs in California to build a Rube Goldberg machine for ESPN SportsNation and has contributed to countless other Rube Goldberg projects.

Luckily for us, Zach lives in New Hampshire and had a friend willing to let him use their historic barn. Inside, he cooked up a Rube Goldberg machine that used technologies familiar to our practice groups and our clients, with
some holiday cheer thrown in for good measure. The story is that a mad scientist in his workshop has dreamed up a gigantifier--a machine that takes normal-sized objects and makes them enormous. He needs a patent for his invention, obviously, and is sending some holiday cards while he's at it.

Did you catch a glimpse of the following items? If you didn't, take another look at the video.

• Previous years' holiday cards from Wolf Greenfield
  
  
• Can of baked beans
  
  
• Mike’s Pastries box
  
  
• Fire extinguisher
  
  
• Toy windmill
  
  
• Mini billiard set
  
  
• Vision chart
  
  
• Actual Easter eggs
  
  
• Toy construction vehicles
  
  
• Pennant from Purdue

Though we hope you enjoyed the beautiful video shot by Pizzuti Photography and BZGibson Productions, you can also check out the inventor's cut for some behind-the-scenes views of how the machine worked: