Cog and Variables
We’re starting a unit on variables in science this week. A great way to get the student interest is by showing how variables can effect the outcome of a project. Honda produced an ad about the Accord in 2003. They called it Cog. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks. Everything you see really happened in real timeexactly as you see it.
The film was shot in two parts only because the studio wasn’t big enough to accommodate the whole shoot. The film took six million dollars and three months to shoot.
Cog was a television advertisement for the Honda Accord, made with minimal CGI and no trick photography. It was created in 2003 by the London office of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy.
The two-minute advert appears as a single, long camera dolly along a Heath Robinson-esque chain reaction arrangement of parts from the car. It is in fact two one-minute chain-reaction sequences, carefully set up on opposing walls of the studio and stitched together[1], the join being at the moment where the muffler/exhaust box rolls across the floor (this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change). The advert took approximately 20 takes on each of five days of shooting to film, and only minimal CGI was used, for lighting highlights and slowing down the motion at one point. The cars featured, one disassembled for the pieces and the other on the trailer, were two of the six hand-built pre-mass production Accords.
