I'm sorry if this has been posted but I just heard about it.

Honda Ad

Six hundred and six takes it took, and if they had been forced to do a 607th it is probable, if not downright certain, that one of the film crew would have snapped and gone mad.

On the first 605 occasions something small, usually infuriatingly
minute, went just slightly awry and the whole delicate arrangement was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe one ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of consequences was a write-off and they had to start again.

Honda's latest television advertisement, a two-minute film called
"Cog", is like a fine-lubricated line of dominoes. It begins with a
transmission bearing which rolls into a synchro hub which in turn rolls into a gear wheel cog and plummets off a table on to a camshaft and pulley wheel. All the parts are from the new Honda Accord - £16,495 to you, guv'nor, or £6 million if you want to pay for the advertising campaign. And what an amazing ad campaign it is, too.

Back on Cog, things are still moving, in a what-happened-next manner redolent of "there was an old woman who swallowed a fly". With a ting and a ding of metal on metal, a thud of contact and the occasional thwock, plop and extended scraping sound, the viewer watches as individual, stripped-down parts of car roll into one another and set off more reactions.

At one point three tyres, amazingly, roll uphill. They do so because
inside they have been weighted with bolts and screws which have been positioned with fingertip care so that the slightest kiss of kinetic energy pushes them over, onward and, yes, upward. During the pre-shoot set-ups, film assistants had to tiptoe round the set so as not to disturb the feather-sensitive superstructure of the arranged metalwork.

The slightest tremor of an ill-judged hand could have undone hours of work.

One of the more striking moments in the film is when a lone windscreen wiper blade helicopters through the air, suspended from a line of metal twine. "That was the first and last time it worked properly," recalls Tony Davidson, of the London-based advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy. "I wanted it to look like ballet."

As take 300 led to 400 which led to 500, a certain madness settled on the crew. Rob Steiner, the agency producer, started talking about "our friends,

Two hand-made pre-production Accords - there were only six in existence in the entire world - were needed for the exercise, one of them being ripped apart and cannibalised to the considerable distress of Honda engineers. By the end of the months-long production, the film had used so many spare parts that two articulated lorries were required to take them away.

The corporate suits at Honda liked the idea immediately, despite the high costs of production and the fact that it was more than twice as long, and therefore twice as pricey, as normal car ads.

When the final, 606th take eventually succeeded, there was a stunned silence around the Paris studio.

Then, like shipwrecked mariners finally realising that their ordeal was at an end, the team broke into a careworn chorus of increasingly defiant cheers and hurrahs.


The Commerical

 

me like!

 

I saw an older version of that commercial, that is a great commercial, thats something that should be on TV, but I dont think it will end up making it since its so long

One thing for sure, its a lot better then honda's Civic nation commercial...lol


-Zoeb

 

WTLW

-Gagan

 

very cool commercial, my only question is....how do they get the tires to roll UP HILL, on the ramp?????


-Ted

 

Well that one is about the fakest part of the commercial. If you pay more attention, you'll notice the second two wheels actually accelerate a little when rolling up the plank.

Other than that, everything went well with physics, i think. But lots of cool ideas went into it. Cool commercial!

 

Look carefully: After hitting the 3rd wheel, the 2nd wheel got bounced back. At this point it was supposed to roll down the plank, but it went up instead!!

 

Again, read the story more closely.

The wheels were weighted inside with nuts and bolts so that they would roll uphill when disturbed.

There is only one CG segment in the whole shot, it was used to stitch together two scenes (where the muffler rolls across the floor) because they couldn't fit the whole thing onto one sound stage.

It was a TV commercial, played for the whole 2 minutes for a few weeks, then split into two for the rest of the run. It's the EU Accord so we won't see the commercial here (we get the TSX instead).

 

Actually, that part of the commercial was filmed in a 'Vacuum' from what i heard. If you look closely you can see the inside of KC135 airplane in the background where they filmed that segment.


eric

 

I am sorry I cut that part of the story out (I couldn't fit it in the 5000 character desctipition). They weighted the inside of the tire with weights....

Here it is from the story....


At one point three tyres, amazingly, roll uphill. They do so because
inside they have been weighted with bolts and screws which have been
positioned with fingertip care so that the slightest kiss of kinetic
energy pushes them over, onward and, yes, upward. During the pre-shoot
set-ups, film assistants had to tiptoe round the set so as not to
disturb the feather-sensitive superstructure of the arranged metalwork.


Cheers