Monday, April 14, 2003

Everybody is talking about the Honda Accord commercial, Cog. Watch the ad here. According to this Telegraph article, it is filmed in one shot with no edits, and took 606 takes to get it right.
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.
Oh, so they didn't take inspiration from the brilliant film The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, then? This is a 30-minute film made in 1987, in which a warehouse full of objects engage in a choreographed chain reaction, similar to the Honda advert. Read about the film here. And watch a brief extract from it here. (Remember, the actual film lasts for 30 minutes, resulting in ever-more ludicrous and inventive reactions, involving fireworks, fire extinguishers and various chemical reactions.)

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