A Crazy Cambridge Contraption

lhdentra writes "A few friends and I got bored one weekend and decided to build a contraption. Remember the Honda advert? We think ours is better." This took dedication.

Comments

for the clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

honda commercial

Slashdot is getting scooped by memepool now.

Re:for the clueless

[Sinus0idal]

The Honda commercial wasn't original - it copied an old short film Der Lauf der Dinge (The way things go)... Imdb link

Re:for the clueless

[quiddity]

search google for lauf.mov
or
http://www.tcfilm.ch/MOVIE1/lauf.mov

Re:for the clueless

[Richard_at_work]

According to the official reports, the tyres had bolts from the car taped to the inside wall about halfway up, so it would cause the type to move uphill.

Re:for the clueless

[ralphclark]

Possible, but just as likely homage to that British fellow William Heath Robinson who did the same sort of cartoons as well as many other types including fantasy art etc. Examples of his mad machines used to be found here but most of the images had to be taken down because of a breach of current copyright. A rather odd idea considering that these mostly date back to the 1910's-1930's.

There are still a few perhaps more recent examples viewable via the wayback machine eg. here and here and here.

Oh, That Cambridge

[Feneric]

It took me awhile to figure out that this was Cambridge in the U.K. and not Cambridge in Massachusetts with the site currently being /.ed.

I downloaded both movies yesterday or so

[drinkypoo]

This was on memepool before it was here.

"The Contraption.avi" is 8368078 bytes and "machine.avi" is 5851896 bytes. If someone wants to do a torrent I'll upload to them but I've never made a torrent and I'm not starting right now.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Exstatica]

i have a mirror of it. http://www.exstatica.net/slashdot/196237/ enjoy :)

Re:You should have built...

[VC]

Mirrordot.org mirror of the video

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[po8]

I believe the tires were weighted internally to achieve this behavior. Counterintuitive, but not cheating.

Mirrored

[Exstatica]

I created a mirror... http://www.exstatica.net/slashdot/196237/ enjoy :)

Link

[Ceirren]

Thanks to mirrordot for the...well....mirror http://mirrordot.org/stories/4a5348d4e9a30ecdb1883 7ab66bcbcbf/index.html

Pure Genius (And Coral Link)

[g_bowskill]

Wow, this looked really awesome! Much more realistic than the Honda one (Which was still pretty cool) in my opinion.

I managed to get to it via coral:

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk.nyud.net:8090/lwh21/ma chine/machine.avi

Enjoy!

Got the torrents up :)

[xbmodder]

The contraption.AVI http://thebrokenwargames.gotdns.com/con.torrent and the machine.avi http://thebrokenwargames.gotdns.com/machine.avi.to rrent the honda video will be up in a few minutes. stop downloading it if you can. I need the video to make meta.

Re:Got the torrents up :)

[xbmodder]

ok i got cog.mov up and running. Umm could i have some donations. My hard drive is grinding. heh message me! cog.mov (honda commercial) is here: http://thebrokenwargames.gotdns.com/cog.mov.torren t

Rube Godwin

[AtariAmarok]

" I've never seen it but I have been told about one called the "Hitler Killer" which was started when a hen laid an egg "

See title. Rube Godwin's Law was named after the fact that in any fierce Internet argument (first Usenet, now elsewhere), whenever someone discusses ungainly contraptions, someone will always ask "but can you kill Hitler with it?"

mirroring

[yack0]

web server on fire...

the original

the edited type movie

The honda wagon commercial - still a classic

Enjoy

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[Ellis D. Tripp]

From what I have heard, the reason for the CGI during the muffler roll was simply to allow the video to be edited together.

The room that the machine was set up in wasn't long enough to incorporate the entire setip, so it was done in 2 parts, with the rolling muffler being the transition shot between the 2 halves.

Re:DIY - Incredible Machine

[yack0]

As I recall, they used weights in the tires to make them go uphill.

Indeed, an article (which I found from googling) describes it.

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jht ml ?xml=/news/2003/04/13/nhonda13.xml&sSheet=/news/20 03/04/13/ixhome.html

Talks about the nuts and bolts in the tires themselves.

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the only cut in the Honda cog is at the exhaust (muffler) section when it rolls across the floor (because they couldn't fit all the components in), apart from that and the 606 takes later, its all real, we discussed this here when the advert was first released

Of course the big hoo-haa was Honda (or their agency) was taking all the credit and collecting numerous prestigous creative awards when they (or their ad company) blatently "borrowed" the idea from Rube Goldberg's "Lauf der Dinge" (the way things go) without giving any credit to Rube, all while giving some bullshit story about being inspired by Mousetrap (the board game) if you see Rube's film (1987) you will see the plagiarism for yourself.
I guess Picasso was right ? "good artists copy, great artists steal"

That is, award winning multi million dollar production companies certainly do.

playing videos on Windows

[Tumbleweed]

If you're on Windows, you want the K-Lite Codec Pack ; this collection of codecs (& Media Player Classic) will let you play just about anything you're likely to come across. Plus you can play QuickTime and RealMedia files in MPC, and not have to use their respective crappy players.

If you're having trouble playing that Star Wars Episode 3 trailer you just downloaded, this'll to watch it just fine.

Re:Faked Honda Commercial

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all been done before. To all those Rube Goldberg fans, the real start of the 'crazy contraptions' was on this side of the atlantic, with W. Heath Robinson's drawings. Goldberg produced many similar and ingenious machine designs, just about 10 years later.

http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/whrobin.htm

The more Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg machines the better, so well done to honda for an amazing advert and starting a new series of contraptions!

Re:Rube

[RichardX]

So would Heath Robinson, especially as he was British