Someone's just pointed this discussion out to me. It's fascinating stuff, especially watching the myths develop.
I work at Wieden and Kennedy. We made the Cog ad for Honda, so I thought I'd answer some of the points that have been raised. (But I don't work in the TV department, so I don't know a load of really technical jargon.)
And Slamdunk - I'm sorry, you lose your $100.
First, overall. There's hardly any CG involved. The one big bit is that we made the film in two halves and stitched them together. The join is where the exhaust pipe (muffler) rolls across the floor. We've always been upfront about having done this. We did it to reduce the risk of doing a take that worked for 110 seconds then failed at the end. Which would have been horribly frustrating. Some of you might have seen version we did which has an Accord saloon at the end. That's how we did that - we filmed a different back half to the film and stitched it together with the original first half.
Then we did a little bit of CG to 'tidy things up' i.e. we took out lots of reflections. With so much shiny metal around, you get all sorts of relections of the camera and technicians and stuff. We took that stuff out. But we didn't make anything happen that didn't happen in the real world.
The wheels rolling uphill are just weighted.
There's no CG on the windscreen fluid.
That's what speakers look like if you rig them up like that and play music through them.
There was someone in the car at the end, pressing the brake pedal at the last minute.
Basically, everything that you see on the film actually happened. That's the easiest and cheapest way to do it. Especially if you want to make it look good.
I think if you watch the thing at broadcast quality rather than quicktime etc some of this becomes a lot more obvious.
It didn't take 606 takes. That's a product of a joke, lazy journalism and google/lexis nexis.
We made a 5-minute film - 'the making of Cog' - and in that one of the creatives wrote 606 on a clapperboard as a gag. Some journalist saw that video and reported that the thing took 606 takes. Then every subsequent journalist found the same thing on google/lexis-nexis and reported it as a fact. We started denying it but no-one seemed to care.
It took two days to actually shoot. But there were months of rehearsal, practise and design with a small group of designers and sculptures and choreographers planning how to make it work and look great.
The online/media strategy was a bit wonky to start with. We weren't just prepared for the interest it would generate, especially in the States, where it's never run. We didn't think many people would be willing to download a two-minute ad. We were wrong. We'll know better next time. In the UK we made a million DVDs and distributed them with national newspapers, so most people have seen the ad that way - which means they've also seen the 'making of' film.
I think that's about it. I hope this has answered some questions and punctured some conspiracy theories. If anyone still cares, it's just an ad afterall.
Very impressive. Apparently it took something like 6 weeks to film because even the smallest vibration would set the whole sequence into motion....
