I think this is one of the few car commercials where you only see the car at the very end..

Right. That’s true. The whole focus of it was showing these bad-ass van clips doing all these wild stunts and then you have the actual van pulling up at the end.

We found everything we could using YouTube or anything involving a lot of van stunts and cut a bunch of them together.

So you found most of the footage on the Web?

Yes, some through Youtube or the Web and then whatever we could think of that had a lot of van footage. There was a lot of stuff from the A-Team.

That’s funny, the theme did remind me a lot of the A-Team.

The team sat through a whole series of that show and brought together a lot of those elements. There’s also a lot of Cheech and Chong stuff.

How easy or hard was it finding footage of vans doing action stunts?

It wasn’t that easy, we had to comb through quite a lot.

Was it hard to procure rights for these pieces of video?

Really hard. Our researchers, Josh Libitsky and Steven Poulsen, had some challenges. We were initially planning to use a clip from a Jackie Chan movie and tracking the ownership of that clips was really difficult because it went to Hong Kong and then, I think, to Universal Studios. It basically ended up that no one knew who it belonged to, but kept giving us outrageous numbers for it. So we abandoned that.

Where’s the original sequence that you filmed? How did you make it match?

It’s the shot around the 9 second mark with the orange van when the camera pulls back, showing the tires peeling off. We treated it to make it more retro and vintage.

Could Honda provide you with an old van to use?

No, We got together and borrowed our editor’s van. He was ok with us using it. It was a team effort.

On the older van footage you used, did you have to remove many logos?

Yes, we had to clone out or blur out all the logos.

What programs did you use?

We edited it together with Final Cut and we used After Effects for a lot of the final effects. As far as trying to treat everything with a grain and make it more vintage than it actually it is. We also used AE on the holdouts and blurs to hide the license plates and logos. And Telecine to do all the color treatments.

I like how it looks like all the clips are from the same era, but the editing’s a little chunky so you know it’s tied together.
That’s something that the company wanted, those transitions. The obvious wipes, but it fits the character of the spot. We did pans, venetian blinds and radio wipes.

How was it working on this, different than other things?

It was different in that editing shaped it most of all. It was a lot of fun. Our editor and producer, Michael Merkwan and Josh Libitsky, had a blast. It’s kind of an editor’s dream, cutting together all this cool stuff.

Who did the music?

The agency provided the music, a studio. Hum Music Company.

Could you cut it afterwards?

I think we had to edit everything according to that music. The music gave it a lot of energy.

How did you come up with the end graphics?

We just wanted to keep it kind of retro and keep that 70s look, 70s or 80s. Give a throwback to that era with the typeface, line and colors. Also, stuff that you see painted on vans, that stripe motif. Still up-to-date though.

Did this experience make you think of using stock footage more for other projects?

Yes, we were actually approached with some other jobs that were pretty similar to it. Doing the van spot was really helpful, just learning the whole process and research behind it. The experience has definitely opened our eyes to more creative uses of footage.