Honda Insight - The Making of "Let it Shine".

http://vimeo.com/4295148 5:19min Posted April 23, 2009.

Quote: Hundreds of headlights are used to build one of the world's largest LED screens. Behind the scenes of the new Honda Insight commercial from Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam.

Transcript:

We're going to do the world's... probably the world's biggest LED screen.

We're approaching it as if it is a real event that we just happen to capture on film.

As far as we know it's never been done on such a massive scale anywhere else before.

The idea of this film in a nutshell, is showing an animated film made entirely of car headlights. The commercial is the first spot in the launch of Honda's environmental brand, and it's for the Insight hybrid, which is both a gas and electric hybrid engine.

The Insight is Honda's sort of latest hybrid, it's really good looking, it's fun to drive and most of all it's going to be sort of the first affordable hybrid on the market.

Honda believes that people are fundamentally good and that's really what this campaign is rooted in.

There are general environmental initiatives, the way they operate as a company. They invest in the belief that people are fundamentally good.

And with the animation, and what we are trying to say with the animation it's kind of holding a mirror up to the world and showing the better side of all of us. This idea that we all want to be good, fits right in line with their "power of dreams" "eco message".

Having a massive grid of cars, I think the original spec was around the thousand cars, so the displaying images animation sequence is using their headlights, and the headlights in the flash on and off, each second to display some sort of animation.

So the set measures about 700 meters deep, and about 200 meters across, behind me over there you'll see there's a crane, the crane is going to have a cage in it and the cage goes up to sixty meters ...

And so you can figure out what height the camera needs to be, how we need to park the cars, incorporate the mountain in the background, how the cars actually need to be parked because of course the higher up you go, the shape changes so you kind of have to compensate for that. The back row would be two and a half kilometres from the camera. So it's trying to get a balance between distance and sort of practical achievability, we kind of animated on a 50mm lens, 60 metres in the air, and also to get the background mountains sort of in perspective, fitting together.

We engaged the services of a lightning expert who does a lot of concerts for Madonna, and when the director and the production company started talking to him he started looking into it and he called all of his contacts and he tried to figure out well, what's the way to do this, and he quickly found out that ... well there's no known way to do this cause no one's ever done it before.

So what we do is we take each one of the pairs of headlights, and it represents a pixel on the video so when that piece comes on, you can see on the screen, when that piece comes on, then the actual units themselves, will trigger as well.

The first time we went up in the crane, it just all came together, it was really amazing to see, it was quite inspiring to start the shoot that way.