Battlestations - Fractal Doritos Commercial Produced for the Crash the Superbowl Contest

To view the commercial click here

On November 1st 2009, Blownapart studios, with the help of 30 students from University Preparatory School in Redding California, shot an entry for a Doritos Superbowl commercial contest.  The entry was titled Battlestations!, and featured a group of Nerds building the world's largest Sierpinski triangle (A fractal) completely built from tortilla chips and then defending it from the hungry football players using their "Nerd Superpowers".  Although the nerds defeat the football players, they didn't notice the cheerleaders who eat the "chip" in the end.

The Sierpinski triangle was built completely by the students out of approximately 12000 tortilla chips under the guidance of their math teacher, Cory Poole.  The triangle measures 64 feet on a side, and would be iteration 6 of the fractal.  As far as we know, it is currently the world's largest Sierpinski triangle that has ever been made.  We actually tried to get Guinness to verify, but they decided that we should instead try to beat the record of world's largest Nachos since they don't currently have any records relating to fractals.

In order to build the fractal efficiently, 243 post it notes were placed to mark 3 foot equilateral triangles where students would build iteration 2 fractals from approximately 150 chips.  It took 30 students about 3 hours to do this.  Iteration 0 is actually 16 chips arranged in a one foot triangle instead of one single chip.  This was done so that the entire fractal would be quite visible even at its large size.

Here is a video showing some of the build process as well as the filming the commercial and generally having a good time.

Some pictures of the building process:

This is the 3 foot triangle that each student was in charge of building.  Notice the post it notes marking the corners and build spot and the 1 foot square template at the top for building the individual triangles.

Students building the Sierpinski triangle.

This is the view from above as the triangle is nearly finished.

Two Students are putting on the finishing touches.  The post-its blew away and so they are trying to figure out exactly where to build.

The finished triangle with most of the builders inside it.

Clean up was much easier than building it!