I’ve been looking for a verifiable backstory to the Honda “Cog” spot that I wrote about previously. While Wikipedia is a great place to get a quick answer, we just can’t rely on the truthiness of each article.

Apparently the ad firm that put together the spot commissioned a making-of-the-spot piece. I found a clip of it on YouTube, and here it is.

At the very least this shows how truly difficult it was to create this spot. I’m sure this required numerous takes to get right. And when one thinks about how complex it was to get hundreds of parts to work together, it’s almost unbelievable that they got it to work at all. And here is a “real life” Rube Goldberg machine. Anyone need toilet paper?

Why do these Rube Goldberg machines appeal to me so much? I guess because they capitalize on merging the technical and the artistic. The are both functional and poetic, in a metaphorical way.