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To advertise Honda's new car, Wieden + Kennedy took it to bits. Gavin Lucas reveals why and how they did it
At a full two minutes long, Cog, Wieden + Kennedy London's new commercial for the Honda Accord, is huge. When it launches on ITV on 6 April, it will fill an entire ad break during the coverage of this year's Brazilian Grand Prix.
"I don't think anyone involved fully realised how complicated this would get," muses Rob Steiner, agency producer at W+K. It was always going to be tricky, given the creatives' initial idea: the kinetic energy invested in a single, rolling cog sets off a chain reaction along a painstakingly set up selection of new Honda Accord components a la mechanical dominoes. Think of children's board game Mouse Trap, think of Caractacus Potts' breakfast-making machine in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or, if your reference points are a little more highbrow, think of the rather similar 1987 German art film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge.
"We wanted to talk about engineering but in a way that's different to most car ads," explains Matt Gooden, art director on the project, "to create something that fascinates on a technical level, yet has a sense of humour."
For the French director of the spot, Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, the most important criterion was "That we only use specifically Accord car pieces and that nothing should be faked in post-production." Why use real parts? Why not animate them or use CG techniques? "Because," says Jonathan Campbell, Honda account director at W+K, "the point that we're making is about the engineering of the car. By filming it all in-camera and using actual Accord car parts, the ad says 'this is how much attention to detail goes in to our cars.'"
So for five months, in a studio in Paris, Bardou-Jacquet and a team including an art director, a sculptor and a photographer as well as a special effects supervisor and a graphic artist, worked on pre-production, testing and re-testing different car parts in different sequences. And this was all done at a time before the car had even gone into production.
Creative director Tony Davidson explains how this problem was solved: "We got a specially built pre-production car from Honda which we totally stripped," he says. "Honda wanted us to include certain car features, such as a door with the wing-mirror indicator and also the rain sensitive windscreen that triggers the wipers." (It was whilst looking at these things that the French team discovered that the windscreen wipers actually "walked" when not attached to the windscreen.)
So was five months of experimenting and testing enough time to ensure that the entire sequence be shot in one perfect take? "Essentially, yes," says Gooden, although he admits that the size of the studio meant that the sequence was filmed in two sections. A vital cog in the making of this ad was the on-set presence of Flame operator, Barnsley from The Mill. He was able to advise straight away on details such as the lighting on the fine spray of water that lands on a windscreen, triggering the walking wipers, so that he didn't have to recreate the water spray in post-production.
Besides being responsible for joining the two halves of the sequence together, Barnsley mainly attended to fine details: "The kind of thing I was doing was slowing an object down here and there if it had clumsily clanked into the next object on the take that we went with basically smoothing out the rhythm of the sequence." There was also some highlighting work to be done to make clear the source of energy or passing on of movement: "At one point a pneumatic pump works to release something," Barnsley continues, "but the movement of the pump in-camera was so slight that I enlarged it to make it easier to see how everything is working in the sequence."
The TV airing during the Grand Prix isn't the only way Cog will worm its way into the nation's consciousness. A confident Tony Davidson says, "It'll also go out in viral form too. It will go round the world like that, even though it's an ad, because it looks great."
