Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Xi'an Featured in US TV Commercial

Watching CNN Obama's inauguration yesterday from justin.tv, I saw this Cisco commercial prominently featuring Xi'an and its city wall:



It looks as if it was shot somewhere outside the south wall. Although I can't quite tell from the video whether this was really shot in Xi'an or not. It looks really clean. Maybe a bit too clean to actually be from Xi'an.

If it was shot in a studio and not in Xi'an, they did their homework. The ad features a number of bridges going over the moat surrounding the city wall which look realistic.

This is the second time Xi'an has been featured in a US television commercial. The first was this Snapple ad from a few years ago shot at Hua Shan:



Watching this ad once again, I just noticed something very interesting.

At the very end of the commercial, you see this shot of the man walking back down the mountain from his visit with the tea guru:



Now check this out.

Here is a picture I took from the exact same spot back in October:



If you look at the staircase and the shrub on the left of the path, I think the Snapple camera man was standing about ten stairs higher up than I was. He probably shot from that stair to avoid the small light post that I caught in my photo.



Craziness. Snapple and I were, obviously, in a strong agreement about this exact spot being a beautiful shot.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Appears to be legit. Here are some pictures of them shooting at the south gate:

http://www.alivenotdead.com/secondchan/CISCO-Shooting+in+Xian+East+Gate-profile-274007.html?r_andhpphoto

Mark said...

Nice find, Taylor!

You are obviously better at using Google than I am. I'm happy to see that this really was shot in Xi'an.