On November 6, 2005, Sony needed a way to convince British TV audiences that its new Bravia LCD sets could show colour like nothing else on the market. Rather than shoot a studio close-up of a screen, agency Fallon London and director Nicolai Fuglsig decided to answer the brief with colour itself: no television in sight, just 250,000 bouncy balls let loose down the steepest street in San Francisco.
What makes the film remarkable is what is missing from it: any CGI at all. Every ball bouncing past parked cars and down a steep San Francisco hill was real, released from trucks and captured in-camera with no visual effects whatsoever. The crew spent weeks phoning every funfair operator and toy distributor they could find just to source enough balls, then set them loose to the hushed, downtempo sound of Jose Gonzalez’s cover of “Heartbeats.”
The shoot did not go quietly. Loose balls dented 32 parked cars and cracked windows on six houses along the route, and it took a cleanup crew of 45 people to sweep the streets afterward. Even so, more than a thousand balls were never recovered, quietly rolling into storm drains and gardens around the city, an odd little footnote residents still bring up when the ad comes up in conversation.
“Balls” went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes and is still taught as a case study in advertising schools for a simple reason: at a time when digital effects could fake almost anything, Sony proved that doing something for real was still the most persuasive trick in the book. The film’s success was big enough that Sony returned the following year with a follow-up, “Paint,” trading bouncy balls for exploding fireworks of colour.
Leave a Reply