I emailed this a few years ago and just found it again. It’s a European commercial for the Honda Accord. More info after the video.
The Video
Some Facts
There are six and only six hand-made Accords in the world, (the cars were “hand-assembled” because they were new models, and pre-production versions were the only ones available at the time the commercial was produced.). To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.
The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again.
The crew spent weeks shooting night and day.
The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including a full engineering of Cog the sequence. When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation — including the costs.
Only minuscule CGI was used, simply for fixing the lighting on the final car’s window. The two-minute commercial appears as a single, long camera pan (although it is in fact two shots stitched together: the join is at the moment where the muffler rolls across the floor – this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change).
The version of the advertisement that originally aired in Australia had an alternate ending that replaces the keyless-entry remote with a seatbelt retractor, which retracts toward the car and allows it to roll forward instead of the truck offsetting the balancing of the ramp.
Download
I have hosted the video here. Right click and click “Save As”
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