Close-Up: Live Issue - Fuglsig lets the balls fly for Sony Bravia TV ad.(Fallon )

Fallon's ad for the Bravia TV features 250,000 bouncy balls careering through the streets of San Francisco.

Fallon's two-and-a-half-minute film for the launch of Sony's new Bravia LCD TV set is as much art as it is advertising.

The premise was simple: what would happen if 250,000 bouncy balls were catapulted down some of the steepest hills in San Francisco?

Randomness is central to 'balls'. The team had no idea what would happen when they put the idea into practice. 'It was mind-blowingly crazy,' the ad's director, Nicolai Fuglsig, says. 'The balls flew down the street much faster than we predicted. Local San Franciscans were gob-smacked. People were hanging out of windows everywhere wanting to see it.'

'It was one of those ideas where you didn't need to write a script - there was no real narrative,' Juan Cabral, Fallon's creative on the ad, says. 'The idea is something that's in every child's mind - to throw things down those steep streets and see what happens.'

Over two days, 250,000 balls were dropped from the scoops of mech-anical diggers and shot into the air by cannons from the top of the hill, while 23 crew on six cameras recorded the results.

Fuglsig and Cabral chose the bouncy balls for their colour - to communicate the colour quality of the Bravia TV - and for their ...