The Honda Ridgeline is a completely new kind of truck, built by a brand not traditionally seen as a truck manufacturer, so we created a commercial unlike anything the segment has seen.

Our spot features a fleet of Honda Ridgelines coming together to create a series of full-scale do-it-yourself projects—everything from a playground to a barbecue deck. Using a unique blend of stop-motion animation with time-lapse photography, we see a team of builders use the features of the Ridgeline to rapidly assemble the series of structures. Each project shows off how the Ridgeline is designed perfectly for the job at hand.

The spot ends with a massive aerial shot showing the projects in their entirety. We reveal they have been built in the shape of the Honda logo.

We innovated a new technique called “long-exposure stop-motion,” which blends a combination of pixilation, object animation, replacement animation, long-exposure photography, live-action and a little CGI for our final logo.

Filmed almost entirely in-camera, the spot features real people, real trucks and life-size sets constructed piece by piece on one of the largest stages in the world.  Very rarely does stop-motion get this big.

The technical challenge was to create an effect suggesting time passing as the builders remove the materials from their trucks and build the structures, but to do it in a way that was more fluid and more pleasing to the eye than traditional time-lapse photography.

The blurred streaks were created by choreographing the actors' movement through the frame during lengthy 2–4 second exposures, under controlled lighting conditions, causing the bright colors of their clothes to leave trails and ghost through the frame.