Honda's Rube Goldberg: Coolest Commercial This Year

[Woolen Horde]

http://www.honda.co.uk/accord/

The Daily Telegraph reported that it took 606 takes for them to finally get the sequence of events right. There are no special effects in this 2 minute commercial, just a whole lot of really tired math and physics majors who spent months setting this sucka up.

The irony is that the motto "It Just Works" took 605 failed attempts before it worked correctly, but it's still the coolest commercial I've seen in years.

Navigate around and watch the high bandwidth version.

[Jakub]

It's really something I could only imagine being dreamed up in Japan, and I think they're the only ones stubborn enough to do it.

[algahar]

here (http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html) is an unofficial mirror site

[wumpus]

That is insane. It's all real? Wow.

[Contrai]

Yeah definitely a good commercial, much better then those odd Kia car commercials :D

[Captain Cookiepants]

All I wanna know is how they made those tires go UP the ramp. Any ideas??

[chet]

It's really something I could only imagine being dreamed up in Japan, and I think they're the only ones stubborn enough to do it.


The makers of the commercial are Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Odd for japanese names. *cough*


Chet

[Alan Au]

All I wanna know is how they made those tires go UP the ramp. Any ideas??
According to this Daily Telegraph article (http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/13/nhonda13.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/04/13/ixhome.html), the tires were weighted with bolts and screws:


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.
- Alan

[Peter Frazier]

The makers of the commercial are Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
Odd for japanese names. *cough*

Chet

No, there is an obvious influence from their film 'The Way Things Go' but they weren't involved in it.
The director's name is the still distinctly unJapanese Antoine Bardou-Jacquet however.

[Captain Cookiepants]

Thanks Alan, I think that's cheating though.

Anyone else find the walking windshield wipers kinda creepy?

[Jakub]

Well my mistake then, Chet.

I still think it's just about the weirdest thing I've ever seen - and that often suggests a rather alien culture like Japan's.

[Jakub]

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.

[chet]

If at the end it either showed a school girl in panties or a woman bound with tentacles raping her, or a bunny with a pancake on its head I would agree. But there is simply not enough fetish fun in this piece for it to be the trademark Japanese obsessive style.

Chet

[Case]

That is insane. It's all real? Wow.

Not quite real:

"The full advert is divided in two - because the studio couldn't fit in all the kit at once.

Just one second of computer generation is used to link the two halves - when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor."

This is according to the Daily Record. You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/page.cfm?objectid=12844132&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=TAKE%20606

Cheers,

Loyd Case

[FlamingSheep]

All I wanna know is how they made those tires go UP the ramp. Any ideas??

I read an article that said they put weights in the tires to force it up hill.

Oh, actually the article is linked above this post...

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/page.cfm?objectid=12844132&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=TAKE%20606

this one

[Brian Rubin]

That is indeed an amazing ad.