Every nation has its athletic heroes, but few countries hold those stars as dearly as Brazil does the late, Sao Paulo-born racing driver Ayrton Senna.

More than just a three-time Formula 1 world champion, Senna was dashing and well-spoken, with a devotion to his sport that ran so deep it had its own kind of spirituality. When he died young and mid-race in 1994, doing what he loved best, his status as a racing icon immediately elevated to that of racing legend.

So for Argentina’s Le Cube animating an Olympics-themed short film depicting Senna’s most famous race was, naturally, “very special for us,” said Ralph Karam, the company’s creative director. “He is much more than a Formula 1 racer, he is a role model in terms of how to be.”

The short, titled Senna, In the Heart of Brazil, is an inspiring message sent directly from Instituto Ayrton Senna, a nonprofit run by the racer’s family, to Brazil’s Olympic athletes, who have the chance to win in their own country at the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. “This movie is to give a message to all the Brazilian Olympic athletes who will compete this year and say, ‘it doesn’t matter if you are already a champion,’” Karam said. “The most important thing is to win here in your country.”

Senna himself knew something about what it feels to be a winner abroad but not at home. Despite triumphing again and again on the world’s biggest racing stages, he lost eight times at the Brazilian Grand Prix in front of his hometown fans. When he finally won it, in 1991, he had to overcome grueling weather conditions, a host of mechanical failures and even the breakdown of his body to earn one of the toughest victories of his career.

Created in collaboration with the JWT agency, In the Heart of Brazil recounts the dramatic contest in a fever dream of traditional animation, using as its vocal track the actual interview Senna gave following the race. The resulting :60 feels like a beautiful hallucination, as though sprung fully formed from the minds of its creators in one manic animation session. In reality, it took nearly half a year of meticulous groundwork to make something that feels so immediate.

Before they could even begin the actual process of animating, Le Cube spent “almost two months just working on the preproduction,” said Karam. Because his team was bringing to life Senna’s actual words, it was very important, he continued, to find a way to “animate a very literal script without being literal in the construction of the narrative… to translate the emotions in his voice and the feeling of having no gears… At the same time it needs to make sense. We can’t be just doing something abstract with movement.”

The need to bring out the expressionistic elements of Senna’s tale was a (ahem) driving force in Le Cube’s decision to refrain from working in 3D.

“The most logical decision in the beginning of this project would be to work in 3D considering that cars are something very rigid,” Karam said. “It would have been much easier to do that, but we didn’t want to do a movie based on cars. We wanted something more human in this animation… This is why we decided to work with traditional animation… in order to give this a human touch.”

To find the heart in In the Heart of Brazil, Le Cube did “a lot of exercises with our illustrators, like drawing cars—just free-drawing Formula 1 cars,” Karam said. During this time, the director encouraged his artists to use whatever technique they preferred, whether ink or pen or paints and beyond. The goal was to, through experimentation, come up with a system of brushwork, shading and motion that felt alive and unpredictable, and yet could be converted into a digital system that a team of 10 animators could work in with no rift in the artistic continuity.

Building that animation pipeline involved honing in on, and being able to replicate over and over, ever-more precise layers of motion, such as the rippling of Senna’s clothes in the wind, the slashing rain, and the smoke from his car’s tailpipe.

“It was very hard because we are talking about Formula 1,” said Karam. “Everything is very fast all the time and we have a lot of details in clothes and a lot of levels of shadow and volume. This was the most complex part of the animation process.”

Once the logistics of its motion design were established, Le Cube could start actually bringing the video to life. To evoke the handmade trappings of traditional animation in the digital space, the studio custom-designed real-world brushes on paper then scanned lines painted with them into Photoshop, eschewing the program’s preset brushes.

“We created new brushes based on our own trace in order to reproduce digitally the same finish that we do in paper,” Karam said.

What ensued from all this is a work of art that could play anywhere, on screens big and small, and in fact, has. It’s opened films at cinemas in Brazil and appeared on Brazilian television. But In the Heart of Brazil also benefitted from one of the most inspired augmented reality executions in recent memory, which saw JWT designing a special Rio Olympics bracelet for the launch of the campaign. When held behind a smartphone, this seemingly innocuous little band projects the video onto the wearer’s wrist, literally pairing an ode to the fierce heart of Brazil’s most famous athlete with the beating pulse of the athletes who revere him.

For Le Cube, working on In the Heart of Brazil was as empowering for the studio as it is for viewers.

“I confess that I almost cried many times just watching his old interviews,” Karam said. “He died when he was at the top of his career, and everyone watched his death in life, so this was very special for us… It was a project that permitted us to put everything that we have learned in the last few years as a studio, in terms of process and creativity, and we are now in a moment where we are ready to face almost any kind of project or challenge.”

Credits

Client: Instituto Ayrton Senna

Agency: J. Walter Thompson Brazil

CCO: Ricardo John, Rodrigo Grau

CSO: Fernand Alphen

Head of Digital: Fábio Simões

ECD: Humberto Fernandez

Creative Director: Gustavo Soares

Copywriter: Gustavo Soares, Rodrigo Rocha

Art Director: Diego Vieira, Erico Braga, Pablo Lobo, Pedro Ricci.

Account Team: Tom Corral, Alice Fairbanks

Project Management: Kazuo Sugui

Media: João Dabbur, Camila Bertoli, Andreia Kalvon, Andre Sanchez

RTV Director/Artbuyer: Marcia Lacaze

Digital Production:: Maisa Delgado, Sergio Costa, Caroline Pivato

Producer: Flavio Colella, João Ricardo

Animation company: Le Cube

Direction: Ralph Karam

Executive production: Gustavo Karam and Juan Manuel Freire

Production: Juliana Millán and Ana Sieglitz

Illustration: Juan Barabani and Mau Lencinas

Animation direction: Daniel Duche

Animation: Daniel Duche, Diego Polieri, Israel Giampietro, Fernando Toninello, Guadalupe Vyleta, Martín Lara, Mau Lencinas

Clean up: Manuela Calderone, Yas Hanna, Juan Huarte, Guadalupe Vyleta

Composition: Ralph Karam and Nicolás Piccirilli

Sound production company: Cachorro Loco

App: Bolha

Client Approval: Bianca Senna, Larissa Mrozowski

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