Check out this clip for the new honda accord, it took a while to download, but very clever
read text below believe it or not!
This is VERY cool. Nice theme for our stuff, eh? Shame about the AUD$18M it cost to shoot ... Anyway, watch the clip, then read below.
http://
home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html
> You will need Flash 6 though.
> http://
home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html
> Lights! Camera! Retake!
> (Filed: 13/04/2003)
> The Honda Accord campaign launched last week looks certain
> to become an advertising legend. Quentin Letts goes behind the scenes
> 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.
> Three valve stems roll down a sloped bonnet. An exhaust box
> is pushed with just enough energy into a rear
suspension link which nudges
> a transmission selector arm which releases the brake pedal loaded with a
> small rubber brake grommit. Catapult! Boing! On goes the beautiful dance,
> everything intricately balanced and poised. Nothing must be even a
> sixteenth of an inch off course or the momentum will be lost.
> 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.
> Utter silence, a
check that the lighting is just right, and
> "action!". Scores of grown men hold their breath as the cameras roll. An
> oil can is tipped and glugs just enough of its contents on to a shelf that
> has been weighted with a Honda flywheel. Some valve springs roll into the
> oil and are slowed to a pace perfect to make them drop into a cylinder
> head assembly.
> If all these technical names are confusing, that is partly
> the point. The advertisement was designed to show motorists all the fiddly
> little bits of engineering that go into the modern Honda. The result, in
> this film at least, is something approaching mechanical perfection and a
> bewitching aesthetic. As car adverts go, it certainly beats the "Nicole!
> Papa!" school of commercial.
> If nothing else, Cog is a welcome departure from the
> generality of car advertisements that feature winding-road landcapes,
> empty highways and clear blue skies. The absence of people from the
> commercial at least saved Honda having to make any regional alterations. >
> It will be able to be shown everywhere from Japan to South
> America, Finland to the Maldives, without any more alteration than perhaps
> a change of the closing voiceover, currently delivered by laid-back
> Garrison Keillor, the American author, who announces: "Isn't it nice when
> things just work?"
>
> Cog looks certain to become an advertising legend and part
> of its allure is the seemingly effortless way the relay of parts slide and
> touch and roll with such apparent ease. The reality of the film's
> production was slightly different. It was, by most measures of human
> patience, a nightmare.
>
> Filming was done over four near-sleepless days in a Paris
> studio, after one month of script approval, two months of concept drawings
> and a further four months of development and testing. One of the more
> surprising things about the ad is that it was not a cheat. Although it
> would have been much easier to fiddle the chain of events by using
> computer graphics, the seesaw and shunt of events really did happen, and
> in one, clean take.
>
> The bigshots at Honda's world headquarters in Japan, when
> shown Cog for the first time, replied that yes, it was very clever, and
> how impressive trick photography was these days. When told that it was all
> real, they were astonished.
>
> 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."
>
> After that, a few yards and several ingenious connections
> down the assembly line, another pair of windscreen wiper blades is
> squirted by an activated washer jet. Because Honda wipers have automatic
> sensors that can detect water, they start a crablike crawl across the
> floor. It is as though they have come to life.
>
> 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, the parts", but in the slightly menacing tone of a
> primary school teacher discussing her charges at the end of a trying day.
> Some workers on the film went whole days without sleep and had to be asked
> to stay away from the more delicate parts of the assembly. Others started
> to have bad dreams about throttle activator shafts and bonnet release
> cables.
>
> When things were going wrong - a tyre that kept trundling
> off to the left, or a rocker shaft that kept toppling over like a tipsy
> cyclist - the production lads on the shoot would start grumbling that "the
> parts are being very moody today".
>
> Commercial makers are often accustomed to working with human
> prima donnas but no Hollywood starlet, no footballing prodigy or showbiz
> celeb, was ever as troublesome and unpredictable as the con rods and
> pulley wheels and solenoids that Davidson, Steiner and Co had to work
> with.
>
> Towards the end of the production, Olivier Coulhon, the
> first assistant director, had spent so many hours in the darkened studio
> that his skin had turned a luminous green and his eyes had sunk deep into
> his Gallic cheeks.
>
> Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, the commercial's director, kept
> puffing out his cheeks and whinneying, a note of deranged despair
> twitching at the corners of his mouth. Asked how long he had been working
> on the commercial, he gave a high-pitched giggle and replied: "Five years?
> Or is it eight?" It felt that long.
>
> 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 idea for the advert derived partly from the old
> children's game Mouse Trap, and from the wacky engineering of Caractacus
> Potts's breakfast-making machine in the Sixties film Chitty Chitty Bang
> Bang.
>
> 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.
>
> The two-minute version of the ad ran for the first time last
> Sunday during the Brazilian Grand Prix, and brought pubgoers across the
> nation to a wide-eyed speechlessness after the Manchester
United v Real
> Madrid game on Tuesday night.
>
> "It was a painstaking process, a tough experience," says
> Honda's communications manager Matt Coombe, recalling the making of Cog.
> Some of the original ideas, such as one stunt involving an airbag, had to
> be dropped owing to a shortage of new Accord parts or simply because they
> were too hard to set up. And on some takes the process would go perfectly
> until agonisingly close to the end.
>
> "It was like watching a brilliant footballer weaving his way
> the whole way through a defending team's players, and then shooting wide
> right at the end," says Tony Davidson. The crew resorted to placing bets
> on which part of the sequence would go wrong. Invariably it was the
> windscreen wipers.
>
> 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.
>
> Champagne bottles popped. The cylinder liner had brushed its
> nose affectionately against the rocker shaft and the gear wheel cog for
> the last time. The interior grab handles and the
suspension spring coils
> had done their bit. A classic was complete. Cog was in the can.
>
she said you're
not going
down there with
me in here!