Sony 'Balls'
Probably one of the most significant projects I have ever been involved in, a true milestone.
May 23, 2006
3 min read
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Agency: Fallon London
Production: MJZ
Client: Sony
As the script arrived, we all could see the huge potential of the project, so we embarked on helping the production with the calculations to do all the planning.
Ultimately, we did film it for real, those balls are real, but from the early stages we wanted to have everything covered and planned, not only the speed, amount of balls, etc, for the actual shoot, but also, internally we planned to take over shots if required.
The project is seen as an event we happen to witness, an outdoor art installation, if you like, for this reason, I was involved very early on, helping calculate the number of balls to buy, as clearly we will need a lot of them because we were considering shipping them from China in case there weren't enough in California, this meant calculating how many containers full of balls we would need.
In the end, it turned out that we needed 250,000, and California could cover it, but of course, it was a mix of balls, so we had to do some tests before we unleashed these.
So, while the FX team built these massive cannons to fire the balls and tested various PSIs to see how things could work, we started planning for scenes in case CGI needed to help in any instance.
LA Tests
It was obvious firing so many balls at high speed could be problematic so we did a test in Los Angeles before heading to San Francisco where we could learn what would happen if... and a lot of thing shappen... amongst those, dented cars, balls hitting the crew and even breaking a cheekbone which lead to the amazing production team to get some riot gear becuase it was pretty brutal.
Filming in San Francisco
As we went to San Francisco and started filming, it was obvious the scale of the operation, the logistics just to collect back the balls meant huge nets, tens of runners and a complex set of rules to make sure we could collect all the balls safely without going into the drainage system and ending up in the sea.
Firing 250,000 balls at 200 kph was very dangerous, so the main camera crew were wearing riot gear as they were in some occasions on the firing line.
The planning also included information on using high-speed cameras at certain times of the day, where the Sun could provide enough light for those shots.
The organisation of the filming revolved not only around the logistics and availability of the streets, but also around the timings for certain shots that required us to film at 2,000 fps.
Bonkers, Brilliant and Magical.