On a sunny July day in 2005, a frog jumped out of a rain gutter to see an unexpected sight: an avalanche of thousands of colorful bouncy balls careening down a San Francisco street.
Although San Francisco has been the setting for plenty of cinematic chase scenes, there had never been any quite like this. Filmed as a British commercial for Sony Bravia TV sets, 250,000 bouncy balls were launched down San Francisco hills in one of the most surreal weeks in the city’s history, resulting in a short film that swept the advertising awards circuit and racked up a cumulative 5 million YouTube views.
You’d think such a spectacle would lean heavily on computer-generated imagery and post-production magic, but after the first ball drop on Filbert Street, the result looked so spectacular that Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig sent the special effects team back to the UK.
“No, we actually did everything in camera,” Fuglsig told SFGATE. “Of course the frog was rigged, but the frog is real.”
Everything in the final cut was shot in-camera, down to that slow-motion frog jump set piece after 1:40, which was staged by production designer Bret Lama by placing a plug in the drainpipe to keep the frog in place until the perfect moment. Then location scout Patrick Ranahan’s son dropped a handful of balls into the pipe from a rooftop as a storm of colorful spheres rushed past. He has kept some of the balls to this day. {read}