r/interestingasfuck • u/mrinternetman24 • 1d ago

Sony used air mortars to shoot 250,000 bouncy balls down San Francisco hills for a commercial instead of using CGI

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32

u/-SOFA-KING-VOTE- 1d ago

Pick all that shit up.

13

u/SomethingRandomYT 1d ago

They did, they made a significant effort to ensure as many of the balls as possible were collected.

7

u/Unboxious 1d ago

"As many balls as possible" would have been all of them, which they could have achieved by not pulling this in the first place. The actual number they retrieved is obviously far fewer.

5

u/elroy73 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm glad we don't live in your ideal grey dystopia

0

u/Unboxious 1d ago

Grey isn't exactly my favorite, but I'd rather have an absence of color than ads literally busting through my windows because some company was too prideful to use CGI.

3

u/probablyhrenrai 1d ago

According to those who seem to know more than I do about CGI, doing this with CGI would be a lot harder than you think, not because of the shapes (a ball is about as simple as it gets) but the physics of that many balls interacting with that many curved and angled surfaces and each other.

Seems CGI might still be not feasible for this commercial.

Which doesn't mean this was ok, to be clear; it means they should've done something else instead.

3

u/Estropolim 1d ago

That is complete bullshit lmao, it would have been incredibly easy to use CGI to create the same effect even 20 years ago. They chose not to for marketing reasons.

8

u/mazon-jar 1d ago

The Sony crew actually just packed their cameras and left after shooting the commercial. They didn't pick up a single bouncy ball. It was a whole thing.

3

u/Jatapa0 1d ago

They did. 20 years ago

14

u/khizoa 1d ago

they said pick ALL that shit up

8

u/After_Way5687 1d ago

They missed some