Honda's new, impossibly complicated, two-minute long commercial
for their Accord model automobile can be viewed at a variety of
sites on the Internet.
Here is a link to one of them!You'll be amazed at this beautifully
choreographed ad!
The Honda Accord ad, known as "Cog," entailed months of production
and design work and another several days of shooting by London's
Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency before the finished product was
introduced in the UK in April 2003. Most of the information
detailed in the e-mail quoted above is confirmed by press articles
about the commercial:
There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film.
Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see
it.
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.
Wieden+Kennedy staffers swear that no trick photography was used
and that the final successful run-through was filmed in real time.
The only voice in the ad is from Garrison Keillor, who intones at
the end, "Isn't it nice when things just work?"
The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually
very minor, didn't work. They would then have to set the whole
thing up again.
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.
1
In the course of a week in a Paris studio, crews agonized through
605 takes. Every time, something went wrong a rolling gear missed
its mark, the oil can poured too much or too little oil, the
disembodied windshield wipers did not come to life with a squirt of
liquid as planned. Finally, on the 606th take, the amazing assembly
worked.
Although no special effects were employed, the 606th take wasn't so
absolutely perfect that the entire commercial was derived from that
one take:
The Honda ad was created without special effects. It was split into
two continuous takes only because no studio was big enough to
accommodate the entire sequence. The only post-production trickery
is the lighting on the car doors at the end.
The sequence of events in the advert is actually split into two
shots shooting the whole thing in one go would have been too
expensive. "It was a damage limitation idea to snip it into two
[parts]," says Rob Steiner, head of television at Wieden &
Kennedy, the agency responsible for the advert. (Still not found
the join? The first section ends and the second one begins at the
one minute mark when an exhaust box rolls off to the right of the
screen. Some clever editing bridges the two parts.)4
The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. The film cost six
million dollars and took three months to complete including a full
engineering of the sequence.
We couldn't confirm the $6 million figure (possibly it's a
misreading of the report that the entire advertising campaign cost
£6 million), and news articles indicate the entire production was
considerably more than three months in the planning:
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.
It took five months of production and design work before "Cog" was
ready to shoot. Then the real work began. In the course of a week
in a Paris studio, crews agonized through 605 takes.
In addition, it's two minutes long so every time Honda airs the
film on British television, they're shelling out enough dough to
keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime. Honda executives
figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in "free" viewings
(Honda isn't paying a dime to have you watch this
commercial!).
We couldn't find any information about how much Honda pays to air
this commercial on TV (ad rates would vary depending upon a variety
of factors anyway), but the Daily Telegraph gave the total cost of
the ad campaign as £6 million. As the message notes, Honda is
probably more than making up for their large investment with all
the publicity the commercial is generating:
Since the ad broke on April 6, visits to Honda's Web site have
quadrupled, and calls to the contact center have tripled.
When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it
immediately without any hesitation including the costs.
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.1
There are six and only six hand-made Accords in the world. To the
horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them
to make the film.
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.1
(The two Honda Accords were "hand-assembled" because they were new
models, and pre-production versions were the only ones available at
the time the commercial was produced.)
Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp,
and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those two cars.
The articles aren't clear on this point, but it sounds like only
one of the two hand-made Accords was actually disassembled ("one of
them being ripped apart and cannibalised") and much more than just
the parts from that one car was used in making the
commercial:
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 . . . Some of the original ideas, such as one stunt involving
an airbag, had to be dropped owing to a shortage of new Accord
parts.
When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and
commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell
off their chairs when they found out it was for real.
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.
In answer to the most frequently asked question about the
commercial:
The sequence where the tyres roll up a slope looks particularly
impressive but is very simple. Steiner says that there is a weight
[in each] tyre and when the tyre is knocked, the weight is
displaced and in an attempt to rebalance itself, the tyre rolls up
the slope.4
In May 2003, filmmakers Peter Fischli and David Weiss threatened
legal action against Honda over similiarities between the "Cog"
commercial and "The Way Things Go," a 30-minute film they produced
in 1987 involving "100 feet of physical interactions, chemical
reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or
Alfred Hitchcock."