Thanks, Pop!

My dad is retired, so on a typical day he has these sorts of things to do:
--pop into the garden for some planting or weeding
--pop down to the rubgy club to watch the game
--pop round to the pub for a pint
so he does a lot of popping--but FAR AND AWAY my father's favourite activity is to send me shitloads of emails with jokes, (more often than not) "jokes", internet warnings that always turn out to be hoaxes, links to stories on various news servers, forwards to clever letters or emails that he has sent others, requests for me to run errands or complete some kind of transactions, chain mails (chain mails! the man is 68), political manifestos, those fucking emails that have a million blinking smiley faces and tell me to have a great day, his general musings on the day (almost always weather-centric), and--beloved and classic--interminable rants about the United States Postal Service. Most of the time I scan through, picking out the important stuff and trying not to get pissed at the extensive volume of other shit.

Today, however, my dad sent me something really cool. It's a link to a HondaUK commercial that is really fascinating, both in viewing and the background information as well. Here is the link, I found it fastest to save the zip file to my desktop and open from there. Below is the text from my dad's email that provides more info re; this.

Unbelievable!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Take a couple of minutes to watch a clever commercial
...BUT DO READ THIS FIRST BEFORE YOU CLICK ON THE LINK.

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 film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete,
including a full engineering sequence.

In addition, it's two minutes long so every time Honda airs the film on British television, they're shelling out enough dough to keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime. However, it is fast becoming the most down loaded advertisement in Internet history. Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in "free" viewings Honda isn't paying a dime to have you watch this commercial!).

When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation-including the costs. There are six and only six handmade Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film. Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls,floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) are parts from those two cars.

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.