Ping Pong Trickshots play the Xylophone (Music Contraption)

What do 213 ping pong balls and a kids toy xylophone have in common? Absolutely nothing. Nonetheless, I built a contraption that bounces them together to make music playing “Can Can” by Offenbach.

This project was heavily inspired by 5MadMovieMaker’s video called "Hot Wheels Xylophone". Huge shout-out for giving me the idea to use masking in adobe premiere. He's an awesome guy, check out his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99nanHbjLXk

If you can't hear the melody clearly, try increasing the playback speed to x1.5 or x2 in the YouTube video player.

Project Notes:
I underestimated how random ping pong ball bounces are. Even on a perfectly flat tile, there can be over a foot diameter where the final bounce ends up. My first design for this contraption included 3 bounces, but I ended up redesigning it to be more reliable. I’m thankful for this decision because it meant less time tracking the ball paths in Premiere. If you’re curious how I achieved this effect, I moved a mask to cover every single movement of every ball’s path by hand. Repeating and overlapping multiple layers became very complicated because the balls would cross paths. Once I learned tracks could be nested together I became more organized.

Huge shoutout to my first patron Brendon! If anyone else would like to support me making videos for this channel here is the link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/doodlechaos
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