Downtown Miami: like.no.other
Cruise passengers often complain about the dearth of street life in Downtown Miami after business hours. Unlike most cities, Miami tends to pull it’s shutters and return to the ‘burbs after the old 9 to 5 is through. Recent developments in our on-again-off-again building boom might remedy that situation when the excess condos convert to rentals to keep speculative developers out of bankruptcy. If they can’t sell the thousands of units they’ve built, there are plenty of people around who can probably still afford to rent them.
We have our virtual fingers crossed that Downtown will soon get a (night) life that goes beyond club kids and the homeless. To that end, we were alerted by friends of ours at BSTE.co.uk (who do some VERY special movie effects) that they had been commissioned to build the world’s largest foam making machines to ship to Miami for a top-secret event. At first we assumed that the 10th Annual ULTRA music festival would be transformed into a retro-Ibiza foam party until we saw the video above.
Sony Digital Imaging Europe held a unique event in Downtown Miami to continue the evolution of their extraordinary like.no.other ad campaign. In 2005, they bounced a quarter million bouncy balls down the hilly streets of San Francisco. In 2006, they bombed Glasgow Scotland with 70,000 liters of brightly colored paint, and last year they crafted millions of multi-colored Play-Doh bunnies to swarm Manhattan.
The dirty streets of Downtown Miami got a much-needed bath as Sony covered the city in TONS of foam and invited a professional documentary filmmaker, a pro photographer, and 200 Miami locals to film the results using Sony Cybershot, Handycam and Alpha line products. Calling the shoot “Foam City,” the project was made possible because Downtown Miami really has few people on the streets late at night. Oh - and the Miami City Film Commission knew a good scrubbing was more than overdue!
Our friends at BSTE built machines that produce 2,000,000 liters of foam every 60 seconds. To give you a literal perspective, a machine like that can fill an Olympic swimming pool with foam in… 24 seconds! The shoot lasted 7 days and will provide the editors with about 16 hours of film to distill into 90-second spots. For the lucky Miamians who got to play and shoot in the foam, this experience truly was like.no.other.
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