Meet The Domino Artist Behind These Amazing Chain Reactions

(tapping)

(clicking)

People just like watching things fall,

for some reason. It's almost hypnotizing.

My name is Lily Hevesh and I'm a domino artist,

which means I set up thousands of dominoes

in intricate arrangements and patterns

and then I knock them down.

[Narrator] Lily is the most popular

domino artist on YouTube. With 2 million

subscribers and half a billion views.

Perfect, yeah!

But not everybody gets it.

I get a lot of comments on YouTube,

someone will be like, 'Dominoes? That's

not an art form. Anyone can do that.'

They don't understand what goes into a

domino 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.

[Announcer] Go, Sonic!

(crowd cheers)

Elaborate domino chains that have made

fans out of celebrities, set multiple

records and earned her a massive online following.

But, even with all of that experience, each project

carries the same risks.

(plastic clicking)

Oh my God.

You know, it's gonna knock down at some points

and you're just going to have to learn

how to deal with that, and get past

it. And keep rebuilding and keep doing it

even if it fails.

She calls her favorite project

the amazing triple spiral. It took

eight days and 15,000 dominoes to setup.

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 a zone where I

can just focus on the dominoes and create

something that I think of and make it

come to life.

(clicking)

Some people are very square and

geometric with their lines, I'm

kind of like freeform and I 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 going to come next.

(clicking)

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,

the 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

other things around it. And then after I do

all of 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 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.

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.

(clicking)

[Man] No!

I knocked it down by accident a couple of 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 'cause

I'm in this setup right now. Building

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 dominoes,

first I'll find the image online, and then

there's a computer program on Microsoft Excel

where you put the image you find 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 1, 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.

(clicking)

The best part for me is seeing something

that I worked so hard on, work all the way

through. Sometimes even spending weeks

planning and building it, I finally get to

see the payoff when I knock it down.

And when I see the last domino fall,

that's like the best part. That's what I live for.