Scott Lyon on Shooting with Drones for Honda

Judy Garland's iconic song Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz has been repurposed for use in Honda's latest spot.

Conceived by mcgarrybowen, the spot is set in a stunning mountain region, while different models from the brand drive along activating movement-sensitive neon lights spelling out the song's lyrics.

We caught up with director Scott Lyon to find out why drones were an essential piece of equipment and what challenges they had to overcome on set.

What was the brief from Honda? 

The brief was to launch the new and improved line up of cars whilst communicating the spirit in which they were made, that being Honda’s notorious pursuit for better.

At what point was the song Over the Rainbow chosen and why? 

The track was already decided and was in the script. It was chosen because of the vocal link to Honda ‘dreams that you dare to dream.' Also, it’s a track that you still recognise when you take the vocals off.

What were the particular difficulties of filming with drones? 

Fortunately, we had quite a bit of prep time so we were able to tightly pre visualise everything to work out exactly what we wanted to achieve within the parameters of what the drone can do. So as far as the shoot was concerned there wasn’t any difficulties with the drones. 

In fact, without the use of drones this spot would have been pretty impossible to do. With ETC post we initially used a drone to scan and take stills of the locations to build a very detailed CGI model of the location so we could be very accurate with timings which is key for the idea of cars doing karaoke.

What was the biggest challenge with making this ad? 

There were many challenges. Firstly, we are locked to timings led by the music. The cars have to hit particular marks at particular speeds and the camera has to hit its marks at the same time. Then you have to counter balance this with not creating too much motion blur or it would be impossible to read the neon words and that’s something that is not fixable in post. That involved working out exactly how big the letters need to be and then the challenge of getting them made that size in Spain, the biggest one was about 15ft high. 

The whole post side was also challenging as we had to reduce the size of the location to save time on the camera travel. We decided that we would split it into three shots and using the data from the scans in CG stitch the three shots together. Giles and James (ETC) really nailed this with all the work they did in prep, it made my job easy… sort of.