Sori’s idea was to treat Ping Pong like a science fiction project or a fantasy movie – to get all the mundane stuff in the camera, and then treat it afterwards to add the special magic, which in this case, was the ball. By his estimation, 90% of the balls in the table-tennis scenes were animated effects, storyboarded by Sori’s long-time collaborator Shinji Aramaki, with whom he would later make Appleseed (2004).

“Actually,” he noted, “a quarter of the entire film, or about 300 shots, were processed with CG.”

In order to ensure that the actors were physically matched with the way real table tennis players would move, Sori drafted Yoshihiro Hiraoka, the coach for the Meiji University table tennis club, to give the cast a crash-course. Players from the real-life club can be glimpsed among the background players, while Hiraoka himself was cast as the coach from Kaio Academy.

“The actors were completely choreographed, or rather, they were practicing their swings. But in the end, they trained for about two months,” said Sori. “After that, they were all young, so they got really good, and they could really hit the ball. But in this production, the setting was super-players, so we added the CG ball later. In the end, that was just an added bonus; the power and beauty of the swings were everything.”

The concentration on interaction with an invisible object proved to be an exciting discipline for the actors, returning them to a stripped-down form of theatre, like stage performers swaying with the motion of an imaginary boat, or mimes negotiating an invisible obstacle.

“We were filming without the ball in sight,” said Sori, “but at that point, the image was almost close to the finished product. I’m not exaggerating; the actors themselves said, ‘When I’m practising, I can see the ball.’ ‘I can tell the ball is there.’ And the cameraman was also following the ball, which he couldn’t see, so it’s amazing.”

From my sleeve notes to the upcoming 88 Films Blu-ray release of Fumihiko Sori’s Ping Pong (2002).