Bouncy Balls Redux
You may recall ymatt and my disagreement about whether the story of someone dumping a few hundred thousand superballs off a San Francisco rooftop to film a commercial was real, or a clever Photoshop hoax (see Pictures don’t lie. Except when they do.)
Well, I think the evidence at this point strongly supports “real.” The commercial (which turns out to be for a new Sony LCD television) is available for viewing online, along with making-of footage: Sony BRAVIA – The advert.
October 29th, 2005 at 11:18 am
All faked.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:20 pm
I was right! BEHOLD!! THE MERMAID!!!
Oh yeah, and all kneel before Zod.
To summarize, I rule, and y’all doubters sucky sucky long time.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Definitely too much boom-boom for me.
November 2nd, 2005 at 1:06 pm
I just watched the Brava commercial and I believe it is a hybrid. There are definitely bits of the video that are real. But if you look at it frame by frame, the light on many of the balls doesn’t make sense. It is too even on the most of the balls. Also the trajectories don’t entirely make sense. They did account for some of the parked cars, but if you think about it, the balls that are colliding with the windows and trunks are too big for typical superballs.
The most damning bit, to me, however, is that they shot it from so many different angles — and with tracking shots as well. That suggests to me that it was not one event but many. You can also see places where balls are coming from multiple streets — so they’d need an amazing shield to catch everything. And at least one of the shots appears to be straight street all the way down to Market. (Plus, it looks like the street in that final shot is Geary or Pine and there’s just no way they’d close that all. Not to mention that the production crew’s position in the still frames is in a different part of SF, facing another direction.
As someone in marketing, I’d say they got a little buzz going to match up with the release. Great concept though!
November 9th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
Guys, I worked on the commercial, was hit by those balls, they’re very real.