The Fruit Giant: Where 105,000 Pieces of VFX Fruit Meet 35mm Film

Tesco's latest brand film is a feat of scale, charm, and filmmaking ambition. The Fruit Giant, directed by Nick Ball through MJZ London for agency BBH, follows a gentle giant made entirely of fruits and vegetables as he travels across the UK with a small companion, giving pieces of himself away to children. The film is the centrepiece of Tesco's Free Fruit & Veg for Schools campaign, which aims to double its reach from 500 to 1,000 schools and benefit over one million children nationwide.

https://vimeo.com/1186981771

The giant himself was built over six months of post-production at Untold Studios, comprising over 105,000 individual pieces of photorealistic fruit and vegetables - a technical achievement of real ambition, and one that makes the character feel genuinely tangible and alive. Colour grade was handled by Simone Grattarola at Time Based Arts.

Shot by DOP Ben Fordesman on digital, the film passed through Cinelab's DFD (Digital-Film-Digital) process, transferring the digitally captured footage to Kodak 250D 35mm film stock, before processing and scanning back to high-resolution digital. On a project with VFX work of this complexity, DFD offers something distinctive: the filmout process physically composites the digital image onto 35mm, meaning the grain and character of film wrap around the VFX elements as organically as the rest of the frame, lending the finished picture a coherence and realism that is difficult to achieve any other way.