Sony Plays with its Balls in San Fran

[emperor]

Advert Homepage
(wont display proper in firefox, gotta use IE )


(via Boingboing)

[tetsujin gaijin]

It displays fine with Firefox. I just tried it.

[GuyJean]

Advert Homepage

That is fucking cool!

GJ

[Charles]

That is fucking cool!

GJ

Thumbs down on the clumsy CG work. Apparently the live footage wasn't quite good enough. But I'm sure the Boujou operator made a bundle of money fixing everything in post.

[drpepper]

[Charles]

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.

Yeah right. There's always one more chance to get things right, in postproduction. You actually think they got a frog to jump out of the drainpipe right on cue? You actually think those circles floating around the foreground of the shots were not added in postproduction? There were lots of dead spots on the screen where there weren't enough balls moving around so they had to "sweeten" it up quite a bit. The CG is quite obvious if you know what to look for.

[GuyJean]

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.

You actually think they got a frog to jump out of the drainpipe right on cue?

Hhhhmmm. How could I get a frog to jump?.. Maybe throw a super ball at it?..

You actually think those circles floating around the foreground of the shots were not added in postproduction?

I'm surprised Charles]There were lots of dead spots on the screen where there weren't enough balls moving around so they had to "sweeten" it up quite a bit. The CG is quite obvious if you know what to look for.[/quote] You could be right, but I think you're wrong.. Did you watch 'the making of'?
http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviamakingofhighqt.html

GJ

[Cubed]

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.

This reminds me of the Honda Commercial "Cog". The agency said that it was shot in a single take and without CGI.

I have a problem with both of these claims - How would we know if they were lying?, and the answer is that we wouldn't, and they're not about to provide anyone with proof.

Anyone can make a paper plane behind closed doors and claim that they did it using their teeth.

So they can claim that "We shot this ad using a pinhole camera, had to clear out the whole of New York, it took two years and we did it all between the hours of 1AM and 5AM and went without food the whole time" is utterly redundant. They can claim whatever they like because we won't know otherwise.

Whether they did this Sony ad with or without CGI is an utterly redundant question for the same reason.

The question should perhaps be "If you did all this without CGI, why weren't you able to make a commercial like this before the predominance of CGI in ads?"

[emperor]

CGI or not - its still a very cool ad... people working in tv stores will hate it no doubt - when it has to be played repeatedly from its promotional dvd... its nice to watch it a few time but, 178,485,926 times is a just a few too many.

It displays fine with Firefox. I just tried it.

Im using Beta2 version: still buggy.

[Cubed]

Actually I just tried downloading it, and Quicktime says that it's been compressed incorrectly, and it doesn't play.

The same thing happens viewing it online - you can only hear the music.

The website didn't tell me that I need to update my version of Quicktime so as far as I'm concerned their website has technical problems, as my Quicktime client can play movies on every other site.

Needless to say, if their TVs work as well as their website, I won't be buying their TVs.

[Charles]

There were lots of dead spots on the screen where there weren't enough balls moving around so they had to "sweeten" it up quite a bit. The CG is quite obvious if you know what to look for.

You could be right, but I think you're wrong.. Did you watch 'the making of'?
http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviamakingofhighqt.html

Yeah, I watched it, and the clincher is that the postproduction was done by The Mill, a well-known CG house. You don't go to The Mill just for editing.

I might be nitpicking and maybe I'm the only one who can see it, but CG is my profession and if you spend a few years tweaking particle emitters and rigid body dynamics, it is pretty easy to see how a bunch of little superballs will behave. And they don't quite behave as they should.
And there's the rub. The real event was spectacular, but it wasn't quite spectacular enough so they tweaked it in post production.

[drpepper]

Why risk getting caught in a lie? Nobody really cares if CG is used or not but by going out of your way to say that "we didn't use cgi" and you had, you set yourself up to be caught on it and no company would risk bad publicity of being caught in a lie over a freakin tv commercial. As for how would we know... well there are all those dozens of people involved in the project, if they lied it would leak like a sieve..

So... your wrong...

[GuyJean]

The real event was spectacular, but it wasn't quite spectacular enough so they tweaked it in post production.

Again, you could be right.. But truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

GJ

[Cubed]

Why risk getting caught in a lie? Nobody really cares if CG is used or not but by going out of your way to say that "we didn't use cgi" and you had, you set yourself up to be caught on it and no company would risk bad publicity of being caught in a lie over a freakin tv commercial. As for how would we know... well there are all those dozens of people involved in the project, if they lied it would leak like a sieve..

So... your wrong...

"You're wrong" you mean.

Well I'll go back to the analogy of the paper plane. It's a locked door. The CG company isn't going to admit it, the commissioning company isn't going to admit it, and hey, if they tell their potential customers via a marketing campaign, then you're not going to believe it either.

It would not leak like a sieve because you would be sued for very large amounts of money for breaching a confidentiality agreement.

Welcome to capitalism. Can't tell a lie from the truth? That's the way TV works.

Have a nice day.

[mr. sparkle]

Of course it was tweaked.

I haven't watched the makin' of, but I betcha Charles is right.

BTW, Boujou kicks some serious ass. There is a low cost version available called "Boujou Bullet". Genius piece of software for match moves.

BTW, they shot this about 4 blocks up from my apato. Probl'y Jones and Union. You can see that butt ugly tenement "Ping Yuen" from there, so it's on the West side of Russian Hill.

[GuyJean]

Of course it was tweaked.

'Tweaked' as in contrast, color, saturation, etc. I'm sure it was too..

I'm just wondering why you guys think everything has to have CG in order for it to be impressive. Look at the equipment they're using, the physics of the terrain, the lighting of the day, the transluscence and artificial colors of the balls.. Those are all ingredients for visions that could seem unbelievable or would have to be artificial.

Photos taken before the age of computers are unimpressive?

So Charles, since now your profession is CG, would you be considered a 'real' artist? Isn't CG just taking other people's creations and tweaking/enhancing them? Something similar to.. I don't know.. A DJ?

GJ

[Charles]

Of course it was tweaked.

I haven't watched the makin' of, but I betcha Charles is right.

BTW, Boujou kicks some serious ass. There is a low cost version available called "Boujou Bullet". Genius piece of software for match moves.

I looked at the video again, the camera moves are so slow it wouldn't really require any fancy match moving.
I'm not saying the balls were faked with computer-generated balls, I'm saying they used digital compositing to put more REAL balls into the scene in places they were needed. Here's the incontrovertible proof of what I'm talking about. Look at the final scene, when they fade to a black background. There are balls onscreen that persist when the video fades out. It looks seamless. Look at The Mill's website, the admit they did it in Discreet flame, a high-end compositing system. The Mill says they composited more real balls over the primary video then faded out the primary video, leaving the composites. Notice how similar the composited balls look to the foreground balls in the scenes that I'm saying are faked.

[quote="GuyJean"]So Charles, since now your profession is CG, would you be considered a 'real' artist? Isn't CG just taking other people's creations and tweaking/enhancing them? Something similar to.. I don't know.. A DJ? ]
Funny you should mention that. I've done video art since way back in the 1970s when I was in art school using B&W reel-to-reel Sony portapak video systems. I once did a job for the LA District Attorney, I rotoscoped the first 8 seconds of the Rodney King video to take the camera shake out, so you could clearly see what was happening, it ended up as the primary evidence in the second LAPD 4 trial. It got pirated (it was in the public evidence files and could be copied freely) and exhibited uncredited at the Whitney Biennial, where it was severely criticised as unfit for the exhibition because it was not produced by an artist. I only heard about this months after the exhibition closed, or I would have come forward to let them know it WAS produced by an artist, but that even I didn't consider it art, I considered it forensic science. My technical skills as an photographic artist helped me to see how to manipulate the image, but the result was not art, it was not produced with the intention of producing any aesthetic result.

[drpepper]

Well if you are going to split hairs.. composting is not cg... i.e. not computer generated...


Apple is the most secret obcessive company on the planet and yet shit leaks out all the time... at least they have something of a reason for doing that. Making up shit just to say we did it without cg is just stupid since it really doesn't matter..

[mr. sparkle]

composting is not cg....

No, composting is what you should do with your organic garbage. Helps your topsoil, you know.

[mr. sparkle]

I looked at the video again, the camera moves are so slow it wouldn't really require any fancy match moving.

I thought that any cam move required match moving.

[drpepper]

bah, it's late at nite, speling brain sells have gon to bed already, gimme a break

[Charles]

I looked at the video again, the camera moves are so slow it wouldn't really require any fancy match moving.

I thought that any cam move required match moving.

You could probably get away without it in this particular instance. Think about it. If you had a locked-down-camera shot of balls bouncing to composite against a shot with the camera moving very slowly in the x axis only, you could just composite the shots and just guesstimate how much to slide the composite layer in x over time. You probably wouldn't even need to slide the layer, the composite layer's bouncing balls move randomly enough that you wouldn't sense any mismatch of motion if you didn't match moves at all.

[EKen9]

Anyone know what song that is? All I know is that it's by José González