I remember this was linked a few months ago, but I just got it over e-mail at work (took the engineers a few months to discover it, but they're all pretty erect about it) and I don't remember that it came with the story.. I thought the story was pretty cool.
-Jessica

Check this out. Click the link before reading the rest of the email. Is
this an engineers dream or what? This is a commercial for the new European
Honda Accord, which will be sold here as an Acura (TSX):
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/honda-ad.html

It's a two-minute ad done without any computer graphics, but will surely
go down as one of the most amazing commercials of all time. If you are
interested, watch the movie first before reading the narrative below. "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. On the first 605 occasions something small,
usually infuriatingly minute, went just slightly awry and the whole
delicate arrangement was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe
one ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the
movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of consequences was
a write-off and they had to start again.

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 tyres, 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 around 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. Utter
silence, a check that the lighting is just right, and "action!". Scores of
grown men hold their breath as the cameras roll. An oil can is tipped and
glugs just enough of its contents on to a shelf that has been weighted
with a Honda flywheel. Some valve springs roll into the oil and are slowed
to a pace perfect to make them drop into a cylinder head assembly.

If all these technical names are confusing, that is partly the point. The
advertisement was designed to show motorists all the fiddly little bits of
engineering that go into the modern Honda. The result, in this film at
least, is something approaching mechanical perfection and a bewitching
aesthetic. As car adverts go, it certainly beats the "Nicole! Papa!"
school of commercial. If nothing else, Cog is a welcome departure from the
generality of car advertisements that feature winding-road landcapes,
empty highways and clear blue skies. The absence of people from the
commercial at least saved Honda having to make any regional alterations.
It will be able to be shown everywhere from Japan to South America,
Finland to the Maldives, without any more alteration than perhaps a change
of the closing voiceover, currently delivered by laid-back Garrison
Keillor, the American author, who
announces: "Isn't it nice when things just work?" Cog looks certain to
become an advertising legend and part of its allure is the seemingly
effortless way the relay of parts slide and touch and roll with such
apparent ease.

The reality of the film's production was slightly different. It was, by
most measures of human patience, a nightmare. 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. The bigshots at Honda's
world headquarters in Japan, when shown Cog for the first time, replied
that yes, it was very clever, and how impressive trick photography was
these days. When told that it was all real, they were astonished. One of
the more striking moments in the film is when a lone windscreen wiper
blade helicopters through the air, suspended from a line of metal twine.
"That was the first and last time it worked properly," recalls Tony
Davidson, of the London-based advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy. "I
wanted it to look like ballet." After that, a few yards and several
ingenious connections down the assembly line, another pair of windscreen
wiper blades is squirted by an activated washer jet. Because Honda wipers
have automatic sensors that can detect water, they start a crablike crawl
across the floor. It is as though they have come to life. As take 300 led
to 400 which led to 500, a certain madness settled on the crew. Rob
Steiner, the agency producer, started talking about "our friends, the
parts", but in the slightly menacing tone of a primary school teacher
discussing her charges at the end of a trying day. Some workers on the
film went whole days without sleep and had to be asked to stay away from
the more delicate parts of the assembly. Others started to have bad dreams
about throttle activator shafts and bonnet release cables.

When things were going wrong - a tyre that kept trundling off to the left,
or a rocker shaft that kept toppling over like a tipsy cyclist - the
production lads on the shoot would start grumbling that "the parts are
being very moody today". Commercial makers are often accustomed to working
with human prima donnas but no Hollywood starlet, no footballing prodigy
or showbiz celeb, was ever as troublesome and unpredictable as the con
rods and pulley wheels and solenoids that Davidson, Steiner and Co had to
work with. Towards the end of the production, Olivier Coulhon, the first
assistant director, had spent so many hours in the darkened studio that
his skin had turned a luminous green and his eyes had sunk deep into his
Gallic cheeks. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, the commercial's director, kept
puffing out his cheeks and whinneying, a note of deranged despair
twitching at the corners of his mouth. Asked how long he had been working
on the commercial, he gave a high-pitched giggle and replied: "Five years?
Or is it eight?" It felt that long.

Two hand-made pre-production Accords - there were only six in existence in
the entire world - were needed for the exercise, one of them being ripped
apart and cannibalised to the considerable distress of Honda engineers.
By the end of the months-long production, the film had used so many spare
parts that two articulated lorries were required to take them away. The
idea for the advert derived partly from the old children's game Mouse
Trap, and from the wacky engineering of Caractacus Potts's
breakfast-making machine in the Sixties film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The
corporate suits at Honda liked the idea immediately, despite the high
costs of production and the fact that it was more than twice as long, and
therefore twice as pricey, as normal car ads.

The two-minute version of the ad ran for the first time last Sunday during
the Brazilian Grand Prix, and brought pubgoers across the nation to a
wide-eyed speechlessness after the Manchester United v Real Madrid game on
Tuesday night. "It was a painstaking process, a tough experience," says
Honda's communications manager Matt Coombe, recalling the making of Cog.
Some of the original ideas, such as one stunt involving an airbag, had to
be dropped owing to a shortage of new Accord parts or simply because they
were too hard to set up. And on some takes the process would go perfectly
until agonisingly close to the end. "It was like watching a brilliant
footballer weaving his way the whole way through a defending team's
players, and then shooting wide right at the end," says Tony Davidson. The
crew resorted to placing bets on which part of the sequence would go
wrong. Invariably it was the windscreen wipers.

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!