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.
_________________________
Tip: see if your question has already been answered before asking it. Try our handy-dandy search tool!
Previous Topic
Index