There’s a current advert for the Sony Bravia range of flatscreen televisions featuring the slogan ‘colour like no other’. The advert consists of a series of very uplifting shots of many, many brightly coloured hi-bounce toy balls cascading down a steeply sloped street in what appears to be San Francisco.
Does anyone happen to know whether this was actually filmed live? - i.e. did they actually let loose thousands of bouncy balls down a SF street?
It may be CGI, but to be honest, it looks too realistic for that.
The balls were sent down Filbert Street between Hyde and Leavenworth, and Leavenworth between Union and Greenwich. The intersection of Filbert & Leavenworth is at 37.8003 deg North, 122.4176 deg W for anyone who wants to look it up on Google Earth. This is about two blocks south of the crooked block of Lombard: if they’d used Lombard they would have had to train the balls to negotiate the curves!
[I used to live about 1 km from there.]
Here is a link to a 55MB Quicktime .MOV of the commercial.
Did anyone else do that as kids?
Roll balls (or tires) down steep hills?
Pretty dumb, IMO.
Really pissed off grown-ups when a tire came through the windshield. :eek:
Peace,
mangeorge
I just watched the Quicktime movie of the ad again and noticed that there’s a brief shot at the end of San Francisco’s Financial District (overlaid with the slogan “Colour like no other”). This is looking southwards down Kearney Street from its intersection with Vallejo Street (37.79893 N, 122.40567 W).
I’d be willing to bet that the balls seen in this final shot are CGI (note that you don’t see them hitting anything - they’re just floating up and down the screen). It would be much harder to get permission to fire balls down onto busy Broadway than on residential Russian Hill (where the main part of the ad was filmed).
Spelling error in previous post: the street in San Francisco is spelled Kearny. [Kearney is the Simpsons bully. D’oh!]
In that final shot, just to the right of the “r” of “Colour” is a green Victorian building with a small cupola on top. It’s a flatiron known as the “Sentinel Building” and is currently owned by Francis Ford Coppola. His American Zoetrope studio is headquartered there, and his restaurant (Café Niebaum-Coppola) is on the ground floor.
I did some consulting work for the Sony facility in Terrassa, Spain last year. Every day for a week when I was waiting for the driver to take me to my hotel at the end of the day, I sat in front of a huge LCD-TV that was playing that commercial in an endless loop. I can’t even begin to imagine how many times I saw that commercial.
I tried to figure out if it was real or animation and finally decided that it was real. In certain scenes you can pick out some individual balls that don’t bounce backwards or off of something or otherwise not in a desirable way. It’s a pretty cool video the first few dozen times.
It’s real? Awesome… Hubby and I have been discussing this ad every time it comes on, and we’d come to the conclusion that it was faked, but it would be awesome to do. It makes me happy inside to find that it was actually real
It would be really, really easy to do this in CGI, so well that it was indistinguishable from reality. Probably a lot easier than it was to do it with 50,000 real rubber balls. But by doing it with the real rubber balls, they get people talking about it on message boards, and in e-mails, and around the water cooler, and get thousands or millions of people to see their advertisements without them even needing to pay for it. That’s good marketing. But if it had been computerized, then the extent of this thread would be one person saying so, and nobody would take any further interest in it.
I think things like this are the next generation of advertising: Instead of attaching ads to content, make the ads themselves the content. See also the Burger King “Chicken Your Way”, and the Honda “Cog” ad, and the Adventures of Superman and Seinfeld shilling for Mastercard. Or for that matter, the Superbowl commercials, which many people go out of their way to see.
