Once, a long time ago, we worked at a film production office in New York City. The crappy part was labelling tapes, getting coffee for people and waking up at 5am to assist on shoots. The cool part was getting a chance to meet some pretty cool artists and to see reels from commercial directors around the world. Sure, they're shilling products, but at least they're getting paid to do their art, and sometimes it can be beautiful.

Case in point, the advertisement for Sony's BRAVIA line of monitors which we've mentioned before. Sony Europe hired agency Fallon London to come up with the concept and filmmaker Nicolai Fuglsig to execute the direction. What they came up with was boucing a quarter million brightly colored superballs down Filbert and Leavenworth -- no CGI, just air guns and bucket drops. 23 cameramen wearing protective gear had exactly one take to get it all right.

Parisist Chryde was following the story, and even managed to get a rough cut of the commercial before it went public. He was kind enough to pass along a detailed timeline of images surrounding the shoot: the first appearance on flickr, a captioned slideshow, video by a block resident [MPG] and finally getting his hands on a copy [QuickTime]. Now, of course, you can watch it all over at Sony's site, including a making-of video from the producers.

We think this thing will probably win an advertising award or six this year, and that Fuglsig's reel is going to be in high demand in New York and LA. It doesn't hurt that the accompanying soundtrack is a mellow, indie-pop delight called "Heartbeats" by The Knife, sung beautifully by Jose Gonzalez. Why are European ads so much cooler than ours? The November 6th UK premiere will be 2:30 minutes long! Us yanks get no such luck.

Merci beaucoup pour 'le scoop,' Chryde!