I thought this is neat

[enat66]

I thought this is neat... It almost looks real.
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html

[zipulrich]

It is real, Eric.

Yes, everything in the ad did happen as shown. There was no computer generation involved.

Nice link! Thanks.

[Harrie]

That was really neat, I enjoyed it! You folks come up with the links on this board, LOL! Now........if someone wants to explain to me how tires can go upwards like that, though....well, I'll be all ears!

[x-static]

haha this is on a civic forum i belong to www.civic-si.com
this is a long post but really worth reading

LONG POST WARNING!

I just got an email with the full story on this commercial. Yes, the tires roll uphill because they are weighted on the inside. It's a long article, but I think it's worth the read. So here it goes...


And now the rest of the story:
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.

[tramtwo]

What is the name of these type of machines, it is driving me crazy not being able to remember.

[Tweaker]

That was cool!

[Miz]

tramtwo - They're "Rube Goldberg Machines": "The purpose of a Rube Goldberg Machine is to build the most complicated machine possible to perform a simple everyday task."

Hmm....does this mean that Windows turns a computer into a Rube Goldberg Machine?

[PostCode]

Although not a commercial in the TV sense, these are some very cool short films tailored around a particular car.

BMW Films International

Each one is over 100MB in size so unless your on a broadband connection, it probably will take to long. Also, QuickTime is required as well.

They are all pretty cool though.

[tramtwo]

Originally posted by Miz
tramtwo - They're "Rube Goldberg Machines": "The purpose of a Rube Goldberg Machine is to build the most complicated machine possible to perform a simple everyday task."

Hmm....does this mean that Windows turns a computer into a Rube Goldberg Machine?

Thanks Miz I have not slept in days. You make a very intresting point.