From the creator:
Racing driver Pedro Rodríguez was one of a kind, a legend in Latin America, and an idol to Porsche fans all over the world. And not only because he was a crazy skilled driver: he made history driving the iconic Porsche 917k, which we can only assume was based on a discarded Batmobile design deemed too unrealistic.
Fifty years after his tragic demise while racing in Germany, we teamed up with The Community and Porsche to honor some of his feats.
Crank up the volume and get ready for a 60-second trip at 300 km/h.
This is our director's cut version for:
The Legend of Pedro Rodríguez!
Let’s start by saying we were granted unprecedented creative freedom in this project by both the agency and the client.
But even before the slightest idea came to our minds, we knew one thing for sure: we needed the car to look perfect in 2D. Animating the Porsche 917k frame by frame, without a reference, sounded like the premise of the next Saw movie, so we decided that a 3D model of the car to produce some sweet 3D layouts was a fundamental asset to get our hands on.
To build Pedro’s world we thought about ‘60s and early ‘70s graphic design, movies, cartoons and tv shows, and discussed with Juan what pop culture and art milestones had left a mark on our styles. We agreed we wanted an overall vintage vibe but with modern visuals and animation ideas that would challenge our craft.
“Speed Racer meets Akira” was our pitch.
In a process we like to call “blind parkour design”, we started importing materials into After Effects and mixing it to see what happy accidents we encountered.
Jumping from After, to Animate, to Photoshop, to C4D, trying things out, not thinking whether something might work or not but simply doing it. Letting our subconscious sublimate. An intense animatic process ensued, where tons of new ideas and references kept flowing and popping up spontaneously.
We wanted the animation timing to feel a little limited, but with lots of super-sharp poses and eases. We chose to work at 24fps and its multiples, focusing mainly on animating in 3s, with 4s and 1s as extremes.
The comp was going to be extra heavy—we knew it and wanted it to be that way. Lots of glows, defocus, and grain. But the hardest comp ever was the one with the oil monster. It required a tremendous amount of coordination, organization and patience, constantly going back and forth between layout, animation, cleanup and comp. That shot alone took about a whole month to produce.
We promise you everything was under painful control.
One last thing you might be wondering: what about the square format, with rounded edges?
We worked in a 2202 x 2202 1:1 format so as to easily come up with different versions later.
The idea all along was to deliver a 16:9 format.
As we went on, new details and compositions increasingly made sense when displayed in 1:1. We sat on it a little, and then El Señor Rodriguez himself inspired the final touch: what if we added a nice frame with rounded corners, giving it a lovely super-8 vibe like the footage of Pedro we were already showing at the end?
That was the last touch. The vintage vibe was exactly what we needed to close the circle.
We raise our cups to Pedro and what his star at 300km/h might bring us.