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Honda's impossibly complex, two-minute long Rube Goldberg-like commercial for their Accord model automobile hit the online world with a splash in 2003: The Honda Accord ad, known as Cog, entailed months of production and design work and another several days of shooting by the London office of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency before the finished product was introduced in the UK in April 2003. Most of the information presented in the e-mail quoted above was accurate, although the number of takes required to complete the shoot was grossly exaggerated (it was actually about 60). There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film. Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. This statement is indeed true: Although it is true that special effects were eschewed in favor of live action, the commercial wasn't derived from a single take. The final result comprised two takes stitched together with a brief bit of CGI: The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including a full engineering of the sequence. We couldn't confirm the $6 million figure (possibly it's a misreading of the report that the entire advertising campaign cost £6 million), and news articles indicated the entire production was considerably more than three months in the planning: In addition, it's two minutes long so every time Honda airs the film on British television, they're shelling out enough dough to keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime. Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in free viewings (Honda isn't paying a dime to have you watch this commercial!). We couldn't find any information about how much Honda paid to air this commercial on TV (ad rates would vary depending upon a variety of factors anyway), but the Daily Telegraph gave the total cost of the ad campaign as £6 million. As the message noted, Honda was probably more than making up for their large investment with all the publicity the commercial was generating: When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation — including the costs. This statement also appeared to be reasonably accurate, according to press reports: There are six and only six hand-made Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film. This claim was also true, although the two Honda Accords were hand-assembled only because they were new models, and pre-production versions were the only ones available at the time the commercial was produced: Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those two cars. News articles weren't clear on this point, but it sounded like only one of the two hand-made Accords was actually disassembled (one of them being ripped apart and cannibalised) and much more than just the parts from that one car was used in making the commercial: When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real. Also a reasonable statement: In answer to the most frequently asked question about the commercial: Here is another video that provides some insight into the making of the commercial: In May 2003, filmmakers Peter Fischli and David Weiss threatened legal action against Honda over similarities between the Cog commercial and The Way Things Go, a 30-minute film they produced in 1987 involving 100 feet of physical interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred Hitchcock:
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