Sony Bravia paints a Glasgow tower block with 70,000 litres of colour

A tower block, a clown, and a Rossini overture

On 17 October 2006, the second instalment of Sony's "Colour, like no other" campaign for the Bravia LCD television range premiered on UK television.^{1, 2} The 70 second film, titled Paint, showed a series of choreographed explosions of colour rolling across a condemned tower block in Toryglen, Glasgow, and the surrounding residential streets.³ A solitary clown wandered through the blasts.³ The soundtrack was Gioachino Rossini's overture from "The Thieving Magpie".^{1, 3}

The work was created by Fallon London and directed by Jonathan Glazer through Academy Films.^{3, 4} The shoot lasted ten days in July 2006, with a crew of 250 and a reported production budget of close to two million pounds.^{1, 5, 6} The team used 70,000 litres of paint, 1,700 detonators, 455 mortars, and 622 bottle bombs to produce the in-camera effects, all of which were rigged to fire in choreographed sequence rather than added in post-production.^{1, 5}

Following Balls without repeating it

Paint was the second chapter in the platform that Fallon and Sony had opened with Balls (2005).² Juan Cabral, credited this time as creative director, again led the concept, and the same "Colour, like no other" endline anchored the work.^{2, 3, 4} The brief, however, was harder than the first time around. A second spot in any campaign needs to extend the visual vocabulary of the first without producing a smaller version of it. The risk was an obvious "Balls but with paint" execution that would feel repetitive rather than additive.

The team's answer was to change the gesture. Where Balls used a single visual idea, repeated thousands of times in physical motion, Paint used a chain of distinct events: explosions, ejections, and cascades, each calibrated to read at architectural scale. The setting moved from the open street grid of San Francisco to the static facade of a tower block. The motion of the colour shifted from gravity-driven downward flow to outward radial bursts. The result was a cousin to Balls, not a sequel.

Glazer in the director's chair

The choice of Jonathan Glazer was a statement of intent. By 2006, Glazer was already widely respected in the advertising community for Levi's "Odyssey" (2002) and Guinness "Surfer" (1999), and in the film community for "Sexy Beast" (2000) and "Birth" (2004).⁶ His involvement signalled to peers and to the industry press that Sony intended to keep the Bravia platform at the level Balls had set. It also gave Glazer access to a budget and a production scale that almost no fully theatrical project at the time could match.

Glazer's craft showed in the editing rather than in the explosions. The film's rhythm was orchestral, set against Rossini's overture, and the cuts were timed less to the music than against it, producing a counterpoint that felt unusually composed. The clown, an unannounced and unexplained figure walking calmly through the blasts, supplied the surreal register that turned the spot from a demonstration into a piece of cinema.

The tower block itself

The Toryglen tower block where most of the film was shot was a real residential building scheduled for demolition.^{1, 7} The local authority and the developer agreed to lease the structure for the production. Fallon used the condemned status to negotiate the level of physical intervention required for the explosions, which would not have been feasible on a building still in use. The tower was eventually demolished on 21 January 2007, six months after the shoot, and a small piece of advertising history was levelled with it.^{1, 8}

The locality remembered the production for a long time afterwards. Local press carried stories about residents who watched the rigging and the rehearsals from neighbouring streets, and about the colour residue that lingered on facades and pavements for weeks after the wrap. The story extended the spot's earned media well beyond its broadcast life.

Awards and the cumulative argument

Paint's awards record matched the ambition of the production. Campaign magazine named Sony Bravia's "Colour, like no other" campaign, Paint included, Campaign of the Year for 2006.^{1, 9} The British Television Advertising Awards gave it Best Commercial in 2007.¹ D&AD awarded a Wood Pencil.¹ The combined effect of Balls and Paint, taken together rather than separately, was to raise expectations for what an advertising platform could be. Sony was no longer running individual spots. It was running an extended argument about the proposition "Colour, like no other", in which each new film added to the cumulative case rather than restated it.

That cumulative logic mattered for Bravia as a sub-brand. By the time Play-Doh (2007) closed the trilogy, the Bravia name had been carried into mainstream culture without ever being attached to a specification sheet.¹ The product had effectively been re-positioned through its advertising. For Sony's television business, which was still in the middle of its transition from Trinitron CRT to LCD panels, the campaign provided a brand asset that did the work of repositioning faster than any retail launch programme could have.²

What the work continues to model

Paint is now nearly two decades old, but it continues to be cited inside production and creative communities for one specific reason. It demonstrated that physical effects, executed at scale and committed to in production rather than added in post, retain a quality that purely digital work struggles to match. The asymmetry between the visible scale of the gesture and the credited cost of the production read as honesty. The audience could feel that 70,000 litres of paint had actually been thrown.

For Sony, the argument was the same one Balls had made the year before, scaled up. The brand's most powerful asset was the willingness to commit. The colour was real, the explosions were real, the clown was real, and the tower block was demolished six months later.¹ Everything in the spot was a piece of evidence for a single proposition. That kind of conviction is rare in television advertising, then or now.