If you thought that the people who set up a room full of dominoes to have them knocked over later was amazing, you haven't seen anything yet. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in these images. Everything that you see happened in real time exactly as you see it.
The recording required 606 takes and in the first 605 takes there always was something, usually of minor importance, that didn't work. It was necessary for the recording team to install the set-up time after time and it took several weeks working day and night to achieve this effect. The recording cost 6 million dollars and it took 3 months to finish,
including the engineering design of the sequence. The duration of the video is only 2 minutes, but every time that Honda shows the commercial on British television, they make enough money to support any of us for the rest of our lives. However, this commercial has turned out to be the most displayed in the history of the Internet. Honda execs think that it will pay for itself simply because of the free showings (Honda is not paying one cent for you to see it) When Honda senior execs viewed it, they immediately approved it without hesitation-including costs.
There are only six Honda Accords built by hand in the whole world, and to the horror of Honda engineers, the recording team disassembled two of them for the recording. Everything you see in the sequence (besides the walls, floor, ramp and untouched Honda Accord) is part of those two automobiles. The voice is that of Garrison Keiller. The commercial was so well received by Honda execs when they saw it, that their first comment was how amazing the computer graphics were. They almost fell out of their chairs when told that the recording was real without any graphics manipulation
By the way, about the wind shield wipers in the new Honda Accords, they are sensitive to water and designed to start working as soon as they get wet.
Here’s the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyN9y0BEMqc
I have seen various other movies before in which inanimate objects independently affect each other in order to create another response that repeatedly triggers action, as seen in the Honda Accord commercial and in The Way Things Go. Perhaps it is because I do not know the maker’s intent in The Way Things Go, but the Honda commercial seems to have a greater purpose and limitations that the engineers overcame, making me more in awe of the footage. Perhaps it’s also because I know the other background facts about the Honda commercial (606 takes, 6 million dollars to film, etc). It seems like there is greater creativity in the Honda commercial, because they were limited to using the car they were promoting (similar to the film style in Leth and von Trier’s film, The Five Obstructions). The narrative seemed self-explanatory; the objects were acting upon each other to prompt the motion of the next.
While I didn’t fully understand the narrative in The Way Things Go, Soft Cinema seemed to have more of a point behind it. Practically all cultures have symbols and colors that have specific meanings. Colors, for example, indicate seasons, teams, and even emotions. The combination of colors, images, text, and sound form what seems to be a more realistic representation of how our brains recall memories. Humans don’t have a perfect memory; details are often left out in exchange for emotions. Soft Cinema was confusing to watch at first, but made more sense as I adjusted to watching it. It’s one thing to think of one’s brain processing and recording memories in the manner Soft Cinema does, but it’s another to watch it on a screen. Watching the video seemed to almost require a passive viewer who didn’t concentrate too hard on the separate pieces of the movie, rather digested it as a whole.
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