This is kinda cool...

"Six hundred and six takes it took, and if they
had been forced to do a 607th it is probable,
if not downright certain, that one of the film
crew would have snapped and gone mad.

Honda's latest television advertisement, a two-
minute film called "Cog", is like a fine-lubricated
line of dominoes. It begins with a transmission
bearing which rolls into a synchro hub which in
turn rolls into a gear wheel cog and plummets off
a table on to a camshaft and pulley wheel. All the
parts are from the new Honda Accord - £16,495 to
you, guv'nor, or £6 million if you want to pay
for the advertising campaign. And what an amazing
ad campaign it is, too.

Back on Cog, things are still moving, in a what-
happened-next manner redolent of "there was an old
woman who swallowed a fly". With a ting and a ding
of metal on metal, a thud of contact and the
occasional thwock, plop and extended scraping sound,
the viewer watches as individual, stripped-down
parts of car roll into one another and set off
more reactions.

Three valve stems roll down a sloped bonnet. An
exhaust box is pushed with just enough energy into
a rear suspension link which nudges a transmission
selector arm which releases the brake pedal loaded
with a small rubber brake grommit. Catapult! Boing!
On goes the beautiful dance, everything intricately
balanced and poised. Nothing must be even a
sixteenth of an inch off course or the momentum
will be lost.

At one point three tires, amazingly, roll uphill.
They do so because inside they have been weighted
with bolts and screws which have been positioned
with fingertip care so that the slightest kiss of
kinetic energy pushes them over, onward and, yes,
upward. During the pre-shoot set-ups, film
assistants had to tiptoe round the set so as not
to disturb the feather-sensitive superstructure
of the arranged metalwork. The slightest tremor
of an ill-judged hand could have undone hours
of work.

Filming was done over four near-sleepless days in
a Paris studio, after one month of script approval,
two months of concept drawings and a further four
months of development and testing. One of the more
surprising things about the ad is that it was not
a cheat. Although it would have been much easier
to fiddle the chain of events by using computer
graphics, the seesaw and shunt of events really
did happen, and in one, clean take.

When the final, 606th take eventually succeeded,
there was a stunned silence around the Paris studio.
Then, like shipwrecked mariners finally realising
that their ordeal was at an end, the team broke
into a careworn chorus of increasingly defiant
cheers and hurrahs.

Champagne bottles popped. The cylinder liner
had brushed its nose affectionately against the
rocker shaft and the gear wheel cog for the last
time. The interior grab handles and the
suspension spring coils had done their bit.
A classic was complete. Cog was in the can."