REFLECTOR:Incredible Commercial for Honda!

[CBarber]

OH MY GAWD!

Chris
once again regreting I never learned my multiplications table so I could
have gone into engineering instead of law. <g>

-----Original Message-----
From: reflector-admin@tvbf.org [mailto:reflector-admin@tvbf.org]On
Behalf Of Jim Agnew
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 8:25 AM
To: Velocity Reflector
Subject: REFLECTOR:Incredible Commercial for Honda!


OK Velocity builders, we have all had those bad days
building so for you engineering inclined you just have to
feel better after seeing this.  It may also explain some of
the finer design points of aircraft!

For those of you in education it may make a fine tool to
teach sticking with a problem until solved.

For the rest of you it does prove that engineers can be
wacky!

Jim


This commercial was made for engineers.

One great commercial, all by hand, no computer use... click
on

http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html



It took 606 takes to get right, and it's all real - even
the tires going uphill. No digital manipulation whatsoever.


Here's an article from The Daily Telegraph talking about
it:

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.





=====
James F. Agnew
Jim_Agnew_2@Yahoo.Com
Tampa, FL
Velocity 173 Elite Aircraft Completed
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