This is by far one of the coolest ads I’ve ever seen (watch it here). Sony released 250,000 Superballs down a street in San Fransisco. The visuals are amazing!
In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days – with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right.
An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you’d know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.”
To learn more about the making of the Bravia commercial, check out Sony’s behind the scenes page.
While doing some basic research, I noticed an odd coincidence. Superballs are made by Wham-O, a company headquartered in — of all places — San Fransisco. Sony chose the city for it’s hills but the coincidence does add something to the coolness of the commercial.
On a personal note, I also noticed that the commercial was made by Fallon London, which I am assuming is related to Fallon USA. I only noticed this because Fallon was the company behind BMW Films’ UnCapTheRide alternate reality game, which I played and completed (I had a 1:200 chance of winning a BMW Z4 and got to attend the endgame party in Las Vegas). Fallon is pretty darn cool.
And for those of you wondering how Sony cleaned up the quarter million bouncy balls, they had a series of large nets and numerous crewmembers with shovels. Stuff like this is why I want to make films.
Photo credit: © 2005 sepiatone, via flickr
hello, I was just wondering if you could tell my the name of the song, or the artist which is used in the sony commercial. :)
Sure! The song is “Heartbeats” by Jose Gonzalez and is found on his new albulm Veneer which you can listen to on Amazon.com. I actually downloaded the song from iTMS and hope to get the albulm soon. :)
Thank you thank you thank you!!
I love this song, and I´m downloading this album. :)
Bye bye, Harpa
Actually, Sony has updated their site with a new section about the music:
They’ve also added an extended version of the ad which is almost twice as long as the original. Worth checking out.
This is an excellent commercial, if anyone ever did anything right in the world of commercials, then it was the people/person behind this one.
Very good work!
~Logan
For the idly curious, the original ‘Heartbeats’ was done by a brother/sister group called The Knife. In a break from tradition, the song started out electronic and went acoustic (the only similar case I can think of is Iron & Wine‘s cover of the Death Cab track “Such Great Heights”).
Anyway. The commercial. Freakin’ awesome.
I love this commercial, and in this case I’m proud to be Danish, just like the director of “Color like no other”..
well done..
do you know who the still photography for the commercial was done by? im using the photo for a school project.
nina: The photo seen above came from sepiatone and is available on flickr. Thanks for pointing that out, I totally forgot attribution and have now added the source. And if you were refering to these photos seen on Sony’s site, the metadata says they were taken with a Canon EOS-1DS but gives no author. Sorry.
UPDATE: a drink company in the UK called Tango has made a really good imitation ad using fruit instead of superballs and it’s almost shot-for-shot. You can watch the parody on YouTube. Enjoy!