Update: More awesome photos. Also, Making-of video.
ten thousand superballs, part 2
Remember the ten two hundred fifty thousand superballs bouncing down Kearny Street? The
commerical they were making is out. It looks pretty cool. Shame about the hippie music, though.
Tags: balls, mpegs, pranks, toys
Current Music: Sneaker Pimps -- Walking Zero ♬
20 Responses:
It IS a shame about the music. That's a very devendra-sounding cover of the excellent electropop track "Heartbeats" by the Knife.
I just posted about this and I posted both the songs for comparison.
What were they thinking?
Acutally, I didn't mind the music. Sony's site has a 7 minute "making of" video (moderately interesting; features lots of turtle-necked designers with funny accents), and promises a 180 second version of the ad "soon."
haha, i really like the music. must be because i was born in the 80's and from europe. i'm immune to the hippie heritage!
I loved it too
I'm surprised that the cost analysis results suggested that CGI was not the best option.
Define "best."
most bang, least buck.
(edit/repost)
My guess is that pure CGI would have looked too perfect and not natural.
Advertising rarely makes cost sense, but since the results are unquantifiable, large companies pour money into ads with kind of an arms-race mentality. The end result, at least in TV commercials, is a crop of art-minded directors that see a $5 million budget for a 30-second spot as a really, really good chance to setup a gimmick shot they've wanted to do for years.
This is probably the best thing about advertising, actually.
I wonder how they recovered all of those superballs after filming.
Ten thousand kids.
Now we know.
The only thing wrong with this is that they didn't use 100,000 superballs. I want to see the street CLOGGED with them.
According to the bravia-advert.com website, there's a link to a non-existant movie saying "Behind the scenes: 250,000 balls coming this way" and text saying "About the commercial: Set to the stripped-down acoustic sound of Josè GonzÃ
:(
http://www.google.com/search?q=sonybravia.mov
That seems to have done the trick.
Try here: sonybravia.mov
You'd figure a 10 MB file would be higher quality... Multicoloured bouncing balls make for some terrible compression artifacts.
Large amounts of superballs are way too much fun. ~150 of them in a hall makes for a very chaotic superball war. It's hard to imagine two hundred and fifty thousand. Too bad the artifacting in the video is so bad.
Is it impolite to comment on something from nearing a year ago? How would such etiquette map to beings of a non-linear existence?
Anyway, the Bravia folks are at it again, this time with 70,000 litres of paint. More stats, and a decent gallery of pictures here.