Inside the VFX Magic of Porsche’s Iconically Nostalgic Dakar Rally Celebration

That’s the thing about time - it just races past you. Amongst many other things, Porsche’s recently-released campaign promoting its 2023 911 Dakar is a poetic reminder of that fact. In the spot, we see the new model zoom along side-by-side with its iconic 1984 sibling in a feast of nostalgia. 

The 2023 model, unveiled last year at the Los Angeles auto show, is kitted out with a roof rack, all-terrain tires, and a 473-hp twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter flat-six engine. But technical specs make way for a satisfying smorgasbord of silky cinematic VFX in this heart-stopping promo.

Directed by Cache Bunny, the ad was brought to life thanks in no small part to the VFX wizardry of the team at Warm & Fuzzy. Spearheaded by John Bashyam, the W&F crew were responsible for all CG rendering and animation throughout the spot. 

To go behind the scenes of the ad and discover how it came together, LBB’s Adam Bennett sat down with John… 

LBB> John, congrats on such an awesome campaign. What was your vision at the outset of the project, and how closely does the finished film align with it? 

John> The goal of the director (Cache Bunny) and client was to create a video that juxtaposed the classic Porsche Dakar 1984 car with the new and refreshed model. It needed to be an homage to the original Dakar race through the desert, all whilst showing how cool the new car is too. They wanted to portray the new car driving side-by-side with the old car through the use of VFX. This involved filming actual footage in the desert of the new car, and augmenting it with realistic split screen CGI environments of the classic 1984 car.

Above: A VFX breakdown of Warm & Fuzzy's work on the ad. 

LBB> Can you tell us a bit more about the specific moments on-screen you guys were involved with? 

John> We handled all of the CG rendering and animation work. This includes the intro flythrough 3D collage, the car morphing effects, and the side-by-side ‘old world’ fully CG environments and car.

LBB> From a technical standpoint, what techniques did you use and why? 

John> We primarily used CG animation for this in order to recreate the original Dakar race landscapes and car models.

One pretty cool and unique thing we did was that we originally built all of the environments in Unreal Engine (UE5) and had our live action drone pilot actually fly through the virtual environments using his controller while we recorded the camera movements. We then used those camera animations in our final shots. This gave the director real time feedback and made our animations feel that much more realistic.

LBB> The ad captures so many different eras and - fittingly, given the subject matter - they zoom past us in a nostalgic blur. Were you conscious in finding a visual way to stay true to each era of Porsche that you were dealing with? 

John> The only real archival footage was at the very beginning of the video. Everywhere else when you see the old grainy car driving next to the new car that “archival footage” is fully CGI. 

We needed to do this in order to make it look like the old car was driving alongside the new one in a split screen world. The only way to achieve this was to track the live action footage of the modern car and create an “archival-looking” CG environment using the same digital camera position.

Above: A gallery of still images taken from the spot. 

LBB> And, beyond the footage that we see on-screen, did you use any other reference material to help inspire you? 

John> We had a ton of reference imagery and videos of the old Dakar races. There is plenty of stuff on Youtube if you just type in “Porsche Dakar 1984”

LBB> As well as the various cars, I understand that you guys were also involved in creating some of the settings and details such as audience members. How did you make sure that these details and places all felt natural and cohesive? 

John> As mentioned earlier, we did use a lot of reference imagery from the original race to inform our creation of the various environments and landscapes. This included the digital audience that you see standing on the sidelines of one shot. We tried our best to match demographics true to who would have been a bystander in the original race.

LBB> What was the greatest challenge you encountered, and how did you overcome it? 

John> The biggest challenge was probably getting the ‘fake archival footage’ to actually feel old. It’s surprisingly hard to make CG renders look like they were shot on a film camera in the 80s! It’s almost easier to make them look sharp and realistic. 

We went through many iterations of degrading the footage in order to make it internationally crappy looking. In the end, we used a combination of various filters, grains, image compression, noise, chromatic aberration, colour correction, and downsampling in order to get it to look the way we were aiming for.