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MillimeterPractical Motion
Aug 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
A two-minute Honda Accord spot called “Cog” has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic even though it's never been broadcast on American television, and only a few times in the U.K., Sweden, and Australia.
 The chain starts with one cog bumping another, which soon causes the exhaust system to rotate. Filming was split into two 60-second halves since the contraption ran too long for one wall of the Paris studio. |
Conceived by London-based agency Wieden & Kennedy, “Cog” was directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet with production company Partizan Midi Minuit, Paris. The complex-looking piece was produced largely in-camera without CG help, as a film camera mounted on a Technocrane tracks the progress of a Rube Goldberg-like invention constructed solely from parts of the new Honda Accord. A rolling cog sets everything in motion, tapping a similar part, which kisses another part, which rolls off the edge of a track.
Several steps down the line, a circuit is completed to start the Accord's CD player. The car speakers' vibrations shake a spring just enough to set it rolling off a pane of glass, and a few steps later, a remote-control button is pressed that closes the hatchback on a complete Accord. This shift in weight makes the car roll forward off a platform. “Cog” then closes with a voiceover from writer Garrison Keillor, who asks, “Isn't it nice when things just work?”
Everything eventually did work on the set of “Cog,” but only after four days and more than 600 failed attempts, following about five months of preproduction. With so many moving parts, anything that could go wrong usually did. Early on, the crew got stuck on step one, when the so-called “cog guy” struggled for about 90 minutes to correctly roll the first piece of the moving puzzle. To make matters worse, as the studio temperature rose with the heat of bodies and lights, the physics of the contraption changed.
But that apparent fragility is a major reason for the spot's popularity. Prohibitively expensive to air on commercial TV at 120 seconds, the commercial has still reached a wide viewership via the Internet, with web video versions linked by bloggers and in emails. Typically, alongside the link is a disclaimer that no part of the commercial was digitally faked.
Rob Steiner, agency producer for Wieden & Kennedy, says that not only were practical effects more attuned to the tagline of the commercial, but CG would not have done the job visually, either. “You couldn't create that type of tension with CG,” he says.
However, computers did come into play in the editing phase. Indeed, what looks to be one continuous shot is actually two, seamlessly stitched together by Flame operator Barnsley of The Mill in London.
“Our reason for shooting it in two 60-second pieces was damage limitation, really,” explains Steiner. “We knew everything physically worked.” But the contraption simply wouldn't fit down the length of a single wall at the Paris studio, so half was built and filmed on one side and half on the other.
With the intent of making the spot look like one continuous take, lighting and shadows in the studio had to look smooth over the full two minutes. Still, “due to constant movement, we couldn't even give [Barnsley] a good lighting reference,” says Steiner.
Before Barnsley got to work — mainly performing small fixes, like wire-removal and centering action in the frame — he spent his time on set, advising the crew on ways to avoid such fixes in post, says Steiner.
But sometimes tweaks were unavoidable. At one point in the commercial, water sprays onto a windshield. Barnsley told producers that he could highlight the liquid more simply using his Flame than the crew could with practical lights. Also, when a fan blows itself across the floor, he slowed that footage to heighten the dramatic effect.
