Re: Amazing Honda Ad
This is about a year old, and still very cool...<br /><br />here's some info:<br /><br /><br />Here is a news story on the making of (watch the commercial before<br />you read the article):<br /><br />----<br /><br /><br />Lights! Camera! Retake!<br /><br />(Filed: April 13, 2003)<br /><br /><br />The Honda Accord campaign launched last week looks certain to become<br />an advertising legend. Quentin Letts goes behind the scenes.<br /><br /><br />Six hundred and six takes it took, and if they had been forced to do<br />a 607th it is probable, if not downright certain, that one of the<br />film crew would have snapped and gone mad.<br /><br /><br />On the first 605 occasions something small, usually infuriatingly<br />minute, went just slightly awry and the whole delicate arrangement<br />was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe one<br />ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the<br />movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of<br />consequences<br />was a write-off and they had to start again.<br /><br /><br />Honda's latest television advertisement, a two-minute film called<br />"Cog", is like a fine-lubricated line of dominoes. It begins with a<br />transmission bearing which rolls into a synchro hub which in turn<br />rolls into a gear wheel cog and plummets off a table on to a<br />camshaft<br />and pulley wheel. All the parts are from the new Honda Accord -<br />�16,495 to you, guv'nor, or �6 million if you want to pay for the<br />advertising campaign. And what an amazing ad campaign it is, too.<br /><br /><br />Back on Cog, things are still moving, in a what-happened-next manner<br />redolent of "there was an old woman who swallowed a fly". With a<br />ting<br />and a ding of metal on metal, a thud of contact and the occasional<br />thwock, plop and extended scraping sound, the viewer watches as<br />individual, stripped-down parts of car roll into one another and set<br />off more reactions.<br /><br /><br />Three valve stems roll down a sloped bonnet. An exhaust box is<br />pushed<br />with just enough energy into a rear suspension link which nudges a<br />transmission selector arm which releases the brake pedal loaded with<br />a small rubber brake grommit. Catapult! Boing! On goes the beautiful<br />dance, everything intricately balanced and poised. Nothing must be<br />even a sixteenth of an inch off course or the momentum will be lost.<br /><br /><br />At one point three tires, amazingly, roll uphill. They do so because<br />inside they have been weighted with bolts and screws which have been<br />positioned with fingertip care so that the slightest kiss of kinetic<br />energy pushes them over, onward and, yes, upward. During the<br />pre-shoot set-ups, film assistants had to tiptoe round the set so as<br />not to disturb the feather-sensitive superstructure of the arranged<br />metalwork. The slightest tremor of an ill-judged hand could have<br />undone hours of work.<br /><br /><br />Utter silence, a check that the lighting is just right, and<br />"action!". Scores of grown men hold their breath as the cameras<br />roll.<br />An oil can is tipped and glugs just enough of its contents on to a<br />shelf that has been weighted with a Honda flywheel. Some valve<br />springs roll into the oil and are slowed to a pace perfect to make<br />them drop into a cylinder head assembly.<br /><br /><br />If all these technical names are confusing, that is partly the<br />point.<br />The advertisement was designed to show motorists all the fiddly<br />little bits of engineering that go into the modern Honda. The<br />result,<br />in this film at least, is something approaching mechanical<br />perfection<br />and a bewitching aesthetic. As car adverts go, it certainly beats<br />the<br />"Nicole! Papa!" school of commercial.<br /><br /><br />If nothing else, Cog is a welcome departure from the generality of<br />car advertisements that feature winding-road landscapes, empty<br />highways and clear blue skies. The absence of people from the<br />commercial at least saved Honda having to make any regional<br />alterations.<br /><br /><br />It will be able to be shown everywhere from Japan to South America,<br />Finland to the Maldives, without any more alteration than perhaps a<br />change of the closing voiceover, currently delivered by laid-back<br />Garrison Keillor, the American author, who announces: "Isn't it nice<br />when things just work?"<br /><br /><br />Cog looks certain to become an advertising legend and part of its<br />allure is the seemingly effortless way the relay of parts slide and<br />touch and roll with such apparent ease. The reality of the film's<br />production was slightly different. It was, by most measures of human<br />patience, a nightmare.<br /><br /><br />Filming was done over four near-sleepless days in a Paris studio,<br />after one month of script approval, two months of concept drawings<br />and a further four months of development and testing. One of the<br />more<br />surprising things about the ad is that it was not a cheat. Although<br />it would have been much easier to fiddle the chain of events by<br />using<br />computer graphics, the seesaw and shunt of events really did<br />happen,<br />and in one, clean take.<br /><br /><br />The bigshots at Honda's world headquarters in Japan, when shown Cog<br />for the first time, replied that yes, it was very clever, and how<br />impressive trick photography was these days. When told that it was<br />all real, they were astonished.<br /><br /><br />One of the more striking moments in the film is when a lone<br />windscreen wiper blade helicopters through the air, suspended from a<br />line of metal twine. "That was the first and last time it worked<br />properly," recalls Tony Davidson, of the London-based advertising<br />agency Wieden & Kennedy. "I wanted it to look like ballet."<br /><br /><br />After that, a few yards and several ingenious connections down the<br />assembly line, another pair of windscreen wiper blades is squirted<br />by<br />an activated washer jet. Because Honda wipers have automatic sensors<br />that can detect water, they start a crablike crawl across the floor.<br />It is as though they have come to life.<br /><br /><br />As take 300 led to 400 which led to 500, a certain madness settled<br />on<br />the crew. Rob Steiner, the agency producer, started talking about<br />"our friends, the parts", but in the slightly menacing tone of a<br />primary school teacher discussing her charges at the end of a trying<br />day. Some workers on the film went whole days without sleep and had<br />to be asked to stay away from the more delicate parts of the<br />assembly. Others started to have bad dreams about throttle activator<br />shafts and bonnet release cables.<br /><br /><br />When things were going wrong - a tire that kept trundling off to the<br />left, or a rocker shaft that kept toppling over like a tipsy cyclist<br />- the production lads on the shoot would start grumbling that "the<br />parts are being very moody today".<br /><br /><br />Commercial makers are often accustomed to working with human prima<br />donnas but no Hollywood starlet, no basketball prodigy or showbiz<br />celeb, was ever as troublesome and unpredictable as the con rods and<br />pulley wheels and solenoids that Davidson, Steiner and Co had to<br />work<br />with.<br /><br /><br />Towards the end of the production, Olivier Coulhon, the first<br />assistant director, had spent so many hours in the darkened studio<br />that his skin had turned a luminous green and his eyes had sunk deep<br />into his Gallic cheeks.<br /><br /><br />Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, the commercial's director, kept puffing out<br />his cheeks and whinnying, a note of deranged despair twitching at<br />the<br />corners of his mouth. Asked how long he had been working on the<br />commercial, he gave a high-pitched giggle and replied: "Five years?<br />Or is it eight?" It felt that long.<br /><br /><br />Two hand-made pre-production Accords - there were only six in<br />existence in the entire world - were needed for the exercise, one of<br />them being ripped apart and cannibalized to the considerable<br />distress<br />of Honda engineers. By the end of the months-long production, the<br />film had used so many spare parts that two articulated lorries were<br />required to take them away.<br /><br /><br />The idea for the advert derived partly from the old children's game<br />Mouse Trap, and from the wacky engineering of Caractacus Potts's<br />breakfast-making machine in the Sixties film Chitty Chitty Bang<br />Bang.<br />The corporate suits at Honda liked the idea immediately, despite the<br />high costs of production and the fact that it was more than twice as<br />long, and therefore twice as pricey, as normal car ads.<br /><br /><br />The two-minute version of the ad ran for the first time last Sunday<br />during the Brazilian Grand Prix, and brought bar patrons across the<br />nation to a wide-eyed speechlessness after the Manchester United v<br />Real Madrid game on Tuesday night.<br /><br /><br />"It was a painstaking process, a tough experience," says Honda's<br />communications manager Matt Coombe, recalling the making of Cog.<br />Some<br />of the original ideas, such as one stunt involving an airbag, had to<br />be dropped owing to a shortage of new Accord parts or simply because<br />they were too hard to set up. And on some takes the process would go<br />perfectly until agonizingly close to the end.<br /><br /><br />"It was like watching a brilliant soccer player weaving his way the<br />whole way through a defending team's players, and then shooting wide<br />right at the end," says Tony Davidson. The crew resorted to placing<br />bets on which part of the sequence would go wrong. Invariably it was<br />the windscreen wipers.<br /><br /><br />When the final, 606th take eventually succeeded, there was a stunned<br />silence around the Paris studio. Then, like shipwrecked mariners<br />finally realizing that their ordeal was at an end, the team broke<br />into a careworn chorus of increasingly defiant cheers and hurrahs.<br />Champagne bottles popped. The cylinder liner had brushed its nose<br />affectionately against the rocker shaft and the gear wheel cog for<br />the last time. The interior grab handles and the suspension spring<br />coils had done their bit. A classic was complete. Cog was in the<br />can.
