Fifty years after his tragic passing while racing in Germany, Clubcamping teamed up with The Community and Porsche to honor some of his feats. Buckle up for a 60-second, high speed director’s cut for: The Legend of Pedro Rodríguez!

Even before the narrative took shape, Clubcamping knew they 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 they decided that a 3D model of the car was a fundamental asset for this task.

Inspiration for Pedro’s world came from ’60s and early ’70s graphic design, movies, cartoons, tv shows, and key pop culture and art milestones. The overall look was vintage with modern visual treatments and animation ideas. The pitch could be summarized as “Speed Racer meets Akira”.

In a process the team likes to call “blind parkour design”, Clubcamping started importing materials into After Effects and mixing it to see what happy accidents they encountered.

Jumping from After Effects, to Animate, to Photoshop, to C4D, trying things out, not thinking whether something might work or not but simply doing it.

They wanted the animation timing to feel a little limited, but with lots of super-sharp poses and eases. The team 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—lots of glows, defocus, and grain. But the hardest comp 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 month to produce.