Just think of all the polar bear cups they've just killed!
Sigh. I'll just win a lotto and stick with my Fisker Karma with recycled wood trims and used denim sound proofing. At least the Karma would've recharged itself just sitting out in the sun.
I say it's real. You can see the cars in the back have darker lights which is accounted for by the fact that they are spaced further apart to create the trapezoid that defeats the perspective effect. One thing I don't get is the decay. In the close-ups, you see the headlights tend to fade over about a second. In the wide animations, there seems to be a very fast response time between frames. It doesn't seem to match up, you'd expect some blurring as the headlight brightness decays when you turn them off.
@bandit: Please see above. You've now taken up the page count space of 4 commenters when your ideas could have been consolidated into a single entry with self-replying/quoting. Somewhat bad etiquette.
Actually, the end shows people in the cars, so perhaps they were all cued to flick the lights on and off by walkie-talkie or something. Wouldn't be hard and you might even convince owners to do this voluntarily or for a small payment. Or maybe they are putting all those backlogged stockpiles to good use!
@bandit: ...to that little "quote" button in the lower right hand corner.
Using the quote to gather your thoughts when your comments are really just segues to each other helps avoid unnecessarily eating into the "20 original comments per page" tally.
Cool ad, although it's a little unclear that those are cars and not a light brite. Perhaps the director should have done something with road rage at the end, with the cars maniacally flashing their brights on and off and then smashing into each other in an escalating car brawl.
@frigg: "...road rage at the end, with the cars maniacally flashing their brights on and off and then smashing into each other in an escalating car brawl."
That would have actually been a better Honda commercial. Or a tourism ad for Hakodate, Japan.
@bosskev: Or perhaps have a few GM SUVs inadvertently drive onto the set, like a couple of lions mistakingly wandering into an ambush of tigers, only to have the reams of Hondas surround and pummel the SUVs into symbolic little cubes.
@Hello Mister Walrus: If they did it on a factory lot, they can. They can claim it was an electrical system check while they were parked after being built.
And also, all that rapid on and off isn't good for those headlights. Some "new" car owner is going to have to pay when their light burns out sooner than normal.
But we paid Al Gore a crapload of money for Carbon Offset Credits, which means we can do whatever we want, and live in a cloud of our own Smug, and claim to be "Green"! Emperor Gore told us so!
@I heart cake farts: Yeah that's what I was thinking. I doubt they would roll out hundreds of brand new Civics and have to sell them as demos or to their employees just to make an ad, when they can so easily do the same thing on a computer. Imagine all the work of perfectly aligning every single car...
@pettiblay: Yet they spent the time to set all the parts of an Accord up to seemless knock each other over. Knowing Honda, they did this for real. Look at their other ads, they are willing to do things that are awesome!
At first I was assuming it had all been CGI--that is, right up until that last second when they showed the landscape from another angle. I had been thinking that cars arranged in a rectangular grid receding to the horizon would not look like at all like a rectangle but would instead "distort" due to perspective. That's when I saw in the last shot that the vehicles had been arranged in a keystone pattern (or, for you math types, a trapezoid), wider at the back to correct for the perspective.
The Prius already tells you if you're driving in a fuel efficient manner or not (or so one of my co-workers who owns one says). No wonder all the other car manufacturers are paying to use Toyota's hybrid tech and not Honda's. Oh, that and Toyota's doesn't sacrifice performance for fuel efficiency.
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Who's with me?
[crickets]
04/27/09
04/26/09
Sigh. I'll just win a lotto and stick with my Fisker Karma with recycled wood trims and used denim sound proofing. At least the Karma would've recharged itself just sitting out in the sun.
Looks cool though.
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Using the quote to gather your thoughts when your comments are really just segues to each other helps avoid unnecessarily eating into the "20 original comments per page" tally.
03/26/09
...by which I mean, of course, the "click here to reply to this comment" button, as it is officially called.
And see how I did not use up an original comment slot?
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That would have actually been a better Honda commercial. Or a tourism ad for Hakodate, Japan.
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At first I was assuming it had all been CGI--that is, right up until that last second when they showed the landscape from another angle. I had been thinking that cars arranged in a rectangular grid receding to the horizon would not look like at all like a rectangle but would instead "distort" due to perspective. That's when I saw in the last shot that the vehicles had been arranged in a keystone pattern (or, for you math types, a trapezoid), wider at the back to correct for the perspective.
11/26/08
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