Pretty neat car ad.

[MarkF 0]

I s'pose this has been posted a thousand times but because I'm blind in one eye and cant see with the other I missed it.
Just in case it wasn't already posted....
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html It's pretty damn neat.

Here's a bit of a blurb. I couldn't be stuffed re-formatting it....

Quote

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.

Ooroo
Mark F...

[jerry81 10]

Wow!
Just like an incredibly long set in The Incredible Machine. I loved that game, but it drove me nuts when something wouldn't worl. How noone suffered a breakdown while making this commercial is beyond me.

---

[nacmacfeegle 0]

G'day Mark,
"As car adverts go, it certainly beats the
"Nicole!
Papa!" school of commercial"

Yeah but Nicole was a Hottie! I'm sorry but valve springs rolling about in oil comes a poor second to Gallic totty flouncing around in a skimpy summer frock!

But it sounds like a cool ad nevertheless, The flash version on the link doesn't do it justice I suspect.

--------------------

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[MarkF 0]

Quote

G'day Mark,
"As car adverts go, it certainly beats the
"Nicole!
Papa!" school of commercial"

Yeah but Nicole was a Hottie! I'm sorry but valve springs rolling about in oil comes a poor second to Gallic totty flouncing around in a skimpy summer frock!

Or how about Nicole, the Gallic Hotty, rolling about in oil...

Stop it, you'll go blind I tell ya.Milligan>....

Of course we didn't get the Nicole, the Gallic Hottie, ad here that I know of and we'll probably not get this one either.

Ooroo
Mark F...

[Guest]

Well, there's the hands-down Cleo winner for 2003!!!

But does this ad suggest that Honda's cars are "Rube Goldberg"? HAHAHA!!!

"The mouse does not know life until it is in the mouth of the cat."