You’ve just gotta see the Honda commercial airing in the UK. Here’s a page where you can view the commercial in your browser – Flash required. It’s about 4Mb total, so it may be jerky or slow to appear on a dialup connection. Here’s an article about how the commercial was created.
There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film.
Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn’t work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again.
The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete.
When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real.
Oh, and about the windshield wipers. On the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start doing their thing automatically as soon as they become wet.
Enjoy!
