There was a lot of discussion about whether there would be motion blur as the camera's moving in, because in real life, if you're doing a zoom that fast, everything would kind of start to streak out and blur. But Neil preferred that we did it with no blur at all, so that it was all very crisp and sharp and pristine, and also because I think he had the idea that we could use that motion blur to hide transitions.

(Laughs) He didn't want to give us any excuse to hide anything. That was a good call, because as Josh said, audiences start to get wise about the tricks that they've seen before. If it was blurry, people might have thought, "oh, that's so they can hide all their mistakes."

PCW: How many individual camera setups were used for the sequence?

Carras: Not counting the cabs, which were their own separate thing, I think there were probably about 15 camera setups. Times three angles per setup, so 45 different camera perspectives that we used.

And that's just the first third of the sequence. Once we go through the Jumbotron in Times Square, the Jumbotron ad turns into an MRI scan of a brain. That was a whole different sequence that we designed in-house. We had a team of animators building brains and neurons and finding objects we could use to create textures that look like the inside of a brain.