Too much time on one's hands

[sobo]

Check this out. Rube Goldberg has finally lost it!

[thelawgoddess]

i can't view it! my computer at work is LAME!!!

[sobo]

You need Flash6 to view it.

 

It's a long-ish vid clip of a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that uses numerous car parts from the new Honda wagon set up "a la dominoes falling" to eventually lead up to the fully assembled vehicle rolling out onto the showroom floor. Really quite interesting, but someone clearly had nothing else to do that week.

[dryad]

Apparently it took 606 takes to get this sequence to work. Here's an article about it http://slate.msn.com/id/2081638/.

[Ursa_Eagle]

After watching the ad, scroll down below and read how they

did it. It

is definitely worth the time and effort...

 

 

 

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.

[Off_White]

There is a german film of the same idea, shamefully ripped off (by many exact copies of processes) by the Honda team, that runs for twenty some minutes, and makes more use of chemical energy as well, that was all shot in one take. Don't get me wrong, the Honda ad is very entertaining and all, but it's blatant plagarism that they don't seem to even vaguely acknowledge.

 

Since we own a copy of the earlier film I could dredge up title and other info in case anyone is interested.

[EWolfe]

sobo said:

Check this out. Rube Goldberg has finally lost it!