Chris Palmer On Scaling Things Down for Honda

Last week saw the launch of Honda's latest campaign for the CR-V, Endless Road. Directed by Chris Palmer of Gorgeous Enterprises with a helping hand from Glassworks, MediaMonks and Harry Potter model-makers The Magic Camera Company, the follow-up to the Golden Lion-winning Illusions includes a world-first digital element in the form of a never-ending YouTube clip. 

Below, Palmer takes us behind the (miniature) scenes of the spot and talks about the technical challenges of the project and out-smarting the physics graduates.

What were your first thoughts on being presented with the brief?

Paul [Jordan, ECD, mcgarrybowen] and I kicked around a few ideas based on extrapolating the Droste effect [a picture within a picture within a picture, and so on] and seeing how far you could take that with a car. The first attempt – which was almost impossible to achieve in itself – used a real-life, stationary car and then Angus [MacAdam, ECD, mcgarrybowen] told us the car had to move... What they did with the Hadron Collider was simple compared with this.

How much pressure was there to match the success of Illusions?

This was a step up from Illusions, but with similar elements. Both ads involved tiny little, hand-sized illusions but when you made them car-sized, everything changed.

 How much and what kind of pre-planning was involved before the shoot?

I spent a lot of time looking at concentric circles, roundabouts and figures-of-eight but I could only do so much on my iPad. Eventually I got together with [VFX artist] Lewis Saunders who created the first animatic. On the first day we went round in circles – no pun intended – before we realised the answer was using tunnels and mountains to make the car disappear and reappear. During the second session, we developed the idea of a spiral road.    

I spent a lot of time Googling mountain passes to find a location with all the elements I needed, and eventually found a vintage postcard of the Pigtail Bridge on the Iron Mountain Road [South Dakota]. I couldn’t believe my luck that it existed. The problem was that by the time it had gone through research and got approved, winter was upon us, and it gets quite snowy in South Dakota. At this point, we realised how unique the location was, so it wasn’t a question of going elsewhere. My solution was a miniature model. I'm obsessed with them.

Can you tell us a bit more about the model-making process?

People have obviously made models before. What hadn’t been done before was the 180-degree camera move, which had to take place over six or seven seconds. On top of that, we had to build an even smaller model within the one-tenth model to achieve the ‘continuous’ effect: the last frame is exactly the same as the first frame. After getting some recommendations, we eventually went with the Magic Camera Company who’d worked on the Harry Potter films.

At what point did Glassworks get involved?

We needed a CGI car, so we started speaking to Glassworks while building the miniature model. They also took over the pre-vis. Once Honda had approved the speed and angle of the car in pre-vis, then we could commit to doing it for real and get on with building the set.

What were the technical challenges of the project and how long did it take to shoot?

The different scales: we had to treat the one-tenth model as a 1:1 model, because that was how it had to appear. The smaller model, the model within, was variable.  The other issue was the crossover points: at one point, the tree looked like it was four foot high and on the other side it looked like it was forty foot, because we were changing the scales all the time. However we cut it, there were always going to be these points where things were a tenth smaller. So I hid them, by putting in rocks at the relevant points. Your brain can’t really tell the size of rocks, whereas if I’d put human beings or trees in, you would have flipped.  

There were so many variables, like what happens if you change the speed and angle of the camera, what happens when you move the model within the model. If you got it wrong by a millimetre, you’d be a long way out.

The irony of it was that after months of pre-planning, the actual shoot only took three days.

How did the never-ending YouTube film come about? Was it part of the brief?

We had all these additional elements, like night, day and different weather, which we wanted to show off. Putting them all into the commercial spot would make it rather busy, but it seemed like such a waste not to have them all, so we decided to do an online version. Plus, that provided the clever ‘Honda factor’.

The final spot is so seamless it almost belies the work that went into it. Do you feel people need to understand the process behind the illusion to fully appreciate it?

I didn’t actually want any ‘making of’ film. When the ‘making of’ team came along, their first question was: ‘What are your hopes for this?’ And I said, ‘Well, they’ve all been dashed, because I didn’t want anyone to know how we did it.’ The whole idea was it was supposed to look like it was shot in the real world and look effortless.

 What was the hardest element of the project for you?

Listening to really intelligent people with physics degrees telling me why it wouldn’t work. I don’t come across as being particularly smart or technical – it’s more of a Columbo approach to things – so the hardest thing was sticking to my guns. It was a bit of a lonely process: I knew intuitively that it would work visually, which was all that mattered, but theoretically, it shouldn’t have worked.

And the most rewarding?

That people liked it. I had no idea how people are going to react. All I knew was it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. When I showed my mate he said, ‘Blimey, I feel a bit sick watching that.’