Probably one of the most significant projects I have eve been involved in, a true milestone.
As the script arrived to us we all could see the huge potential of the project, so we embarked on helping the production on 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 as 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.
As I went to San Francisco and started filming, it was obvious the scale of the operaition, the logistics just to collect back the balls meant huge nets, tens of runners and a complex set of rules to make sure everyone and everything was safe.
Firing 250,000 balls at 200Kmph was very dangerous so the main camer crew were wearing riot gear as they were in some ocassions on the firing line.
The planning also included informatoin on using high speed cameras on certain times of the day where the Sun could provide enough light for those shots, therefore the organisation of the filming revolved, not only about the logistics, availability of the streets, but also when timings for certain shots that required us to film at 2,000 fps.
Bonkers, Brilliant.
Credits
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig Agency: Fallon London Production: MJZ Task: VFX Supervisor
