"Wicked" Wednesday- The Bouncy Ball Takeover
Bouncy balls. Something about them just makes me smile. Brings out the kid in me. Makes me think pink fuzzy childhood memories. So... yesterday my brother showed me this "wickedly" cool commercial and it made me wonder how sweet it would be to be able to come up with a wildly cool idea like this and actually let it play out. How cool-- well, and quite possibly really stressful-- would a producing a commercial like this be? Almost like a crazy dream that someone had and then woke up and was like-- "woah, I should try that in real life!"
Check out some of these screen shots.. and then visit the website if you'd like to watch the whole commercial.
Yeah... that is a LOT of bouncy balls! CHECK IT OUT!
*edit* According to the website-
"Set to the stripped-down acoustic soundtrack of José González' "Heartbeats", 250,000 'superballs' come flying, in slow motion, over the brow of a typical street in San Francisco, raining down on anything that gets in their way. And it was done without computer graphics.
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.
But when you get it right, you get it right. The goal at the beginning was to deliver a "really simple, visual celebration of colour". We think you'll agree the results speak for themselves."
Stay tuned for next weeks "Wicked" Wednesday... er.. that is if I can find any other wicked-cool sites to show you. If I can't... well.. yeah, we won't think about that now.
5 comments:
Jen,
That's a sweet commercial. I love super balls! Awesome!
So, what exactly were they advertising? And why when will this be on TV? That was pretty cool. Now, did they actually put all those balls out for real, because that would be cool. From the description, it sounds like they did, but some of it looked like CGI to me. Bouncy balls made for great fun, but I ALWAYS lost them after only a few minutes. At least they were cheap.
Ok... so they were advertising a LCD monitor from Sony. It's all about the Color. According to their website they "wanted to get across a simple message - that the colour you'll see on these screens will be 'like no other'." From reading up on it it sounds like they actually shot all of those 250,000 multi-coloured superballs out for real. I think a lot of the effects were done with film speeds (slowing things down or speeding them up) and different camera angle shots. Not even sure when or where this will be on TV, but it was shot this summer, so it is fairly new. My brother just happened to see some of their still shots on flicker (a photo website) and was like dude, you HAVE to check this out. I love stuff like that.
I was actually going through my bouncy ball/superball collection the other day. I have some that are multicolored, some opaque, some translucent, and one that has a red, white, and blue tie-dyed effect with streamers hanging off of it.
Another thing that is really cool are those small plastic caps that you invert and then they go flying up in the air. My physics class did experiments with them. Note to the wise - don't place your face in front of a flying cap or try to invert the thing off of your forehead.
Megan-
I've TOTALLY played with those small plastic caps that you were referring to! Actually, I remember we used to get them from the dentist "treasure chest" after our apointments and have contests to see who could get theirs the highest. We would also try to invert them and then put other things on top to see if we could get them to fly as well. It's amazing how the simplist things can entertain us as kids. (well.. they STILL entertain me.. hence the reason why I have all these random toys on my desk! weee!)
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