Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) (formerly Quaker City Mercantile) + Red Rover Unleash Puma Spot
10/01/2001

A new animated Puma spot leads up to the next World Cup championship.

Philadelphia-based Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) and Toronto animation studio Red Rover created "Cameroon," a new international animated Puma spot for the lead up to the next World Cup championship.

The spot focuses on the Cameroon national football team, a World Cup regular and perennial underdog. Using clean, illustrated lines, rich color, slick editing, and numerous visual treats, the Cameroon squad's on-the-field action likens the players to vicious big cats. One sequence with hulking players rising up from beneath the ground seems to reference, "Clint Eastwood," the Gorillaz video from London's Passion Pictures, but throughout, the visuals are up-tempo and original.

Andy Knight, the animation director of the piece says he and his team worked from a fairly open brief.

"We started by looking at the players and uniforms, and playing around with some design until we were happy with it. We looked at illustration rather than animation when it came to design," says Knight. "All the animation was hand drawn with the exception of some of the backgrounds which are CG (created with 3D Max). We also did something a little different. We have an in-house editor [Scott Bucsis]. We boarded shot angles we thought would be cool and gave it to the editor who played around with it, and the transition from the guy screaming into the lion is something the editor did with flash cut intercutting. It was more derivative of live action that animation."

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Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) (formerly Quaker City Mercantile) + Red Rover Unleash Puma Spot