Honda’s ad for the HR-V, which features some pretty nifty choreography, has gone viral. We caught up with Mcgarrybowen's european creative director Paul Jordan, to discover the idea behind the ad, how it was made and the impact of its popularity.
Honda’s ad for the HR-V, which features some pretty nifty choreography, has gone viral. We caught up with Mcgarrybowen’s executive creative director Paul Jordan, to discover the idea behind the ad, how it was made and the impact of its popularity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-VXL156QDo
It’s pretty straightforward really. The HR-V was designed to be perfectly ‘in-step’ with peoples lives. So we wanted to create an ad that demonstrated this. Yet we didn’t want to make a hackneyed, lifestyle ad. We wanted to find a visually entertaining way to do it.
First we storyboarded each scene. We then evolved these with the director Kim Gehrig. Kim created pre-visualisations with the post-production house MPC and the scenes evolved again. Then the work really started; months of casting and auditions and rehearsals. We drilled every set piece with 60 dancers so that it looked impressive but was still safe to perform with a car in close proximity. We had over six weeks of rehearsals.
I was in a club at an Old School revival night – this track came on and half the room started dancing in formation. It was incredible to watch and really stayed with me. So, of course, “Stepping” has everyone moving in formation and strangely this jungle track just happened to worked brilliantly with the picture.
Honda precision is not the same as the clinical precision of say a German auto manufacturer – Honda precision has humanity at its heart. We like to call this “warm engineering”. And so with this ad, people are moving around in very precise but playful ways. We think it’s a pretty good expression of “warm engineering”.
Ha ha. Funnily enough OK Go once took their inspiration from us. Our Honda CR-V ad called “illusions” inspired their promo for “The writing is on the wall” which came much much later. Honda “Stepping” was actually inspired by the the Japanese art of Precision Walking.
Yes and no. Of course, we always aim to produce work that people will really love – but you can never be certain how anything will really go down until it’s out there in the big wide world.
2015 has been a huge year for Honda with new products and new campaigns coming thick and fast. We’re looking forward to seeing the public response to this film and bedding in the launch of HR-V as a whole before we build on it.
