Preliminary results suggest superball poisoning.

They also have the 'making of' video there, which is just as cool.

It was pretty cool, but for some reason, watching the footage backwards was cooler. The balls all sorted themselves out and flew back up the wall to the roof.

(And then I promptly went and downloaded the artist's music in the background. It plays soothingly on repeat in the background while I code. Who says sharing music doesn't lead to sales.)

Oh and don't worry about the frog: we saw him in an ad for digital cameras in the same theatre a week later, so he's clearly not hurting for work at the moment.

With a strong component of urban fantasy.

(iTunes has the music also)

However, in the final shot, the camera is certainly on Telegraph Hill, overlooking Broadway pointing down Kearney Street. You can see the sign for Fresno Street in the lower left. You can also clearly see the corner of the Coppola Building at Kearney and Columbus right in the middle of the picture.

It was clearly not just a single street. I strongly suspect the use of virtual superballs. Still, very cool. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

The more I think about it, the more I am leaning towards having found the write-up initially on boingboing...

Ah, my google-fu is strong!

I thought perhaps they used lots of superballs, but added more, perhaps extra-colorful ones in prominent places.

My computer apparently is too old, slow & otherwise limited (eg 96 meg RAM, and it may be out of slots) to handle Quicktime v7, needed to play the ad. What it has is 4; the computer tried to upgrade to 5, which ain't there no more, neither.

Ah, well. It does most of what I want it to, most of the time.

I did look at some of the stills.

And, though it looks like I'll have to try downloading their files and it's too late right now, here's a page with a bunch of video from the pingpong ball avalanche experiments.

I believe things bode well for the frog. I was looking at the making-of video, and it seems in addition to the main shots they did a few controlled shots with fewer balls. It looks like the shot with the frog had only a small number of balls within it, which leads me to imagine the clearly talented ranine likely escaped unscathed.

I would have loved to have been there to see them go, but slow motion film really captures the beauty. At full speed in real life, I bet it would have been a huge adrenaline rush.

Drains were blocked and ball wranglers brought in to prevent the sort of side effects Stefan mentioned above. If there were dead sea lions, it would had made the papers here. If the Chronicle didn't report it, the Examiner would had and would had blamed it all on Mayor Newsome. If neither of those reported it, the Mercury News would had in order for Silicon Valley to count coup on San Francisco.

But wait, there's photos:

Bouncy Ball Cannon

10,000 Bouncy Balls On the Roof

Fortunately, the commercial did not provoke the outcry that trucking in snow for a snowboarding contest did. That even, for Johnny Mosely's 30th birthday, upset a Bridus Godzillus who didn't want it upstaging her spotlight.

Oh, and Leavenworth... what famous movie detective lived on that street?

There is no way anybody would sit for some crazy German guy pouring real superballs down Kearney onto Broadway for a television commercial. I don't care who he is or how cool it would look. That just isn't done. I think the superballs shown in the final scene were added by blue screen effect.

The ones on Leavenworth and Filbert were real superballs.

Tough one. Sam Spade lived on Post Street. If I had to guess, it would be Nick Charles in The Thin Man, but I don't actually remember him living in San Francisco in the movie until he shows up in After The Thin Man, and the swanky place they put him in for that movie was way the heck up on Russian Hill somewhere. Might have been on Leavenworth.

I give up. Which one?

My guess is it was a stunt frog, one of the shots where they just let a small controlled drop (same with the dog). All of these shots were carefully set up and planned, yet the camera captured spontaneous moments because there's no controlling 25,000 superballs or how a frog jumps. The camera found the randomness.

Now that I know there's a market for it, I'll start mass production immediately.

The ones on Leavenworth and Filbert were real superballs."

You're right. They didn't. Fulgsig is Danish.

Yeah, among other things. Watching the trash cans get knocked over made me think...if you got too close to that, you could be killed. One hit from a superball might or might not leave a bruise. A hundred, and certainly some of them will. Thousands and thousands...well, enough bruises really will kill you (kidney failure). Not to mention what happens if you get hit hard enough to damage organs directly.

This may be why there are no people getting caught in it. No way to do that safely.

But gods, it's beautiful.

Drains were blocked and ball wranglers brought in

Ball Wrangler. Somehow it never occurred to me that such a job existed. That's what I want to do with my life.

My apoligies to him for calling him German. That was stupid. I should have listened more closely.

He's still crazy— I saw that Bond villain gleam in his eye. Nobody sane gets that gleam after successfully depriving a hundred million American children of their supply of polyurethane toy balls.

John M. Ford said: With a strong component of urban fantasy.

I'm sure you were just being facetious, but that does bring up the issue I have with other folks (nobody on this board really!) being so anal over the use of SF to describe science fiction. I live in SF (aka San Francisco) and my mom grew up in Oakland, so SF has always meant San Francisco in my head. I use science fiction or SF/F to denote science fiction for exactly that reason. (Or I would wander around SF going, "Where's the science fiction in this pizza? It says SF Pizza. I demand science fiction.")

Of course, knowing what I know about this board, it does behoove me to cautiously throw around my city's initials. I will now refer to it as SF! to keep everybody from being confused.

.....

Back to the balls. I know 90% of the balls in the commercial were real balls. Apparently they were QUITE noisy, and reportedly the filmmakers brought in prop cars because they weren't sure what sort of impact 100,000 Superballs would make on most peoples vehicles. I think one of the filmmakers wanted real balls because he said something about how the virtual balls don't have the same effect.

I'm willing to bet that one of the final shots had blue-screened balls though, or went through some kind of digital compositing.

I don't know how they do stuff in other cities like NY, but here whenever they film on a street in SF!, they pass around flyers a month in advance and tell us that if we park on said street on such and such day during such and such hours, the DPT will tow us. (The DPT is happy to do so. SF!--look, I'm doing it again--parking is nigh on legendary for how crappy it can be, and I've never heard of any of my friend successfully fighting the DPT on tickets or towing. I sometimes wish the city would release numbers on the revenue that comes from parking fines.)

Anyway, the DPT will tow your car, and the street gets all blocked off, and you have lots of men in official looking vests and headsets waving you around. (They did a shoot recently outside my MUNI stop. In a year or two when a Will Smith movie about a homeless guy in SF! in the 80s shows up, and you see him at a BART stop in front of a park--THAT BART STOP DOES NOT EXIST. They tore up an eighth of Duboce Park to make it, and transplanted trees and everything. It made all us commuters at the stop a little sad that it wasn't a real BART stop.)

But I digress....

Cripes, the producers of Spiderman 2 built an entire working cross-town elevated line and then tore it down without leaving a trace.

Man, that pissed off a lot of New Yorkers.

Off I go. Greater minds than mine have offered guidance in the ways of Google Fu; what I like in skills is my fault, and not theirs.

I found this:
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/gold-medal-winner-the-superball-prank-108453.php

(Unfortunately, while I can google like a mofo, my html skills blow. So, Teresa, if you'd like to fix this comment so the links are actually clickable, rather than cut-and-pasteable, please, do so)

Unfortunately, the link at the end of the article there didn't provide me with a solid destination. So further discipline:

http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/002769.html

The video is there. It's a .wmv and slightly large, but, boy how, is it worth it.
(enjoy)

**SKNFFFPLPBTTT***

Okay, I almost managed to say it with a straight face.

As for the music -- another ripple from VW's use of Nick Drake, perhaps?

1. Take a CRT into a vacuum with micro- or no gravity.
   
2. Have it show some colourful moving picture.
   
3. Induce the screen to fragment---a glancing blow with bullet, or maybe a bunch of squibs (we don't want to damage the CR gun, just the T).
   

Of course, if I knew how to use elementary ray-tracing and kinematic software, simulating this might be a kindergarten project.

Unfortunately, I then learned that the Chinese company that had done the production run for Wham-O used a different makeup of Zectron (TM) than the original balls did and my big box could only do an 80% bounce rather than the 92% my old Superball did. So I'm back to carefully using my old Superball, storing a really cool shipping box downstairs with 11 Official Superballs in it (I gave one to a friend recovering from cancer surgery), and fighting off a burning desire to go into illicit Zectron manufacturing. Hmmm..sounds like a job for Jon Singer. Hey, Jon--admit it, you need a break away from pottery glazes...

And, while I'm writing: festive good wishes all round.