That Time a Film Crew Let 250,000 Bouncy Balls Free Through San Francisco

In 2005, Sony Bravia filmed a striking ad for its televisions featuring a quarter of a million colorful bouncy balls hopping down the steep streets of San Francisco.

Sony teamed up with Fallon London for an ad designed to showcase the color capabilities of Sony’s Bravia TVs for a British audience. With no CGI involved, there really were 250,000 bouncy balls running through SF.

Filmed over four days, the crew closed off streets so that cinematographer Dan Landin could capture the balls bouncing in free motion. To prevent damage to windows or cars, the team erected nets to catch them. But ultimately, things got so chaotic that windows were broken and cars were dented.

But before the filming could commence, the team first had to acquire 250,000 bouncy balls which involved “calling every funfair, dealer, and Tivoli in America,” said Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig in a behind-the-scenes video. For a brief moment, there were no bouncy balls available for kids in the U.S.

SFGate recently spoke to the crew behind the ad who told them that a special launch system had to be put in place. This essentially involved cannons firing the balls up in the air so they would bounce high down the steep San Franciscan hills.

“They told us there’s 250,000 bouncy balls coming,” Barry Conner, who made the launch system, tells SFGate. “We thought, oh, well, it’ll fill up a few carts. Then these semis started showing up.”

But before any balls started bouncing, the crew first had to gain permission from the City and its residents.

“I really admire and have always been so grateful to Patrick Ranahan [the location scout]. This was by far the most difficult location managing job I’ve ever been involved with,” Fuglsig tells SFGate. “The fact that he managed to convince all the residents in all these neighborhoods to do this — I was very nervous about if we were gonna get a ‘no.’”

On the first day of the shoot, 25,000 balls were loaded into 12 mortars and six cameras were stationed around Fiber and Hyde Street as well as Jones and Union Street to capture the action.

Using specialized, slow-mo Photo-Sonics cameras, the crew wore Kevlar armor, riot shields, and helmets to protect themselves from the onslaught of bouncy balls.

“The sound of it was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe the sound,” Fuglsig tells SFGate.

Other members of the crew characterized it as “chaos” as some balls reached a top speed of around 130 miles per hour. Some of them bounced over houses into areas the crew didn’t think possible.

In one shot in the ad, you can see a piece of wood coming away from a house. The bill for broken windows came to $74,000 but the location scout Patrick Ranahan tells SFGate that despite the damage, people in the neighborhood loved it.

The shoot continued for several days until the city government ordered them to stop using mortars, which forced them to mount shipping containers filled with balls onto forklifts and drop them from 65 feet into the air.

Special effects and production specialist Barry Conner says that by the final day, the personal assistants hired to retrieve the balls had mostly left, and they were relying on spectators who had started gathering to watch the filming to collect them instead.

Set to José González’s dreamy Heartbeats song, the ad eventually premiered on British television before a big Premier League soccer game on November 6, 2005. It never aired in the United States.