250,000 superballs
You might have seen the new Sony Bravia ad on television - it's the one with the superballs bouncing down a street in San Francisco. A lot of the shots looked really amazing, but some of them looked like they might have been CGI. I had the music (which turns out to be Heartbeats by José González) stuck in my head and went searching for info on the ad. Turns out there was no CGI involved at all:
In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days - with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right.The advertisment has its own website (I think that's great), and high-res pictures, suitable for desktop backgrounds.
An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you'd know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.