McDonald’s “Bursting With Fruit”

DDB Chicago approached us after having seen our experimental short “Flowers” and asked us if we could apply the idea of shattering flowers in slow motion to a pair of commercials featuring their new line of fruit smoothies. We said yes immediately.

After playing with a bunch of bananas, a bucket of liquid nitrogen and a Casio Exilim we were relieved to find out that we hadn’t lied. The fruit was flash frozen to −196 °C and smashed while being filmed at 1000 frames per second. On the actual shoot we used a Phantom camera and a lot more light, but the basic principle stayed the same. Major props go to Faye, MaryBeth and Mark from DDB for convincing the client to go with an idea this abstract.

Credits:
Agency: DDB Chicago
Faye Kleros (AD) MaryBeth Adduci (W) Mark Olsen (P) Patty Phasos (P) Liat Ebersohl (P)
Production Company: Helios Design Labs
Alex Wittholz (Dir) Dylan Macleod (DP) Marc Pannozzo (Ed, Comp) Tony DiMarco (P) Matt Brushett (Anim)

Some still photos from the McDonald’s “Bursting” shoot.

Lots of light in a tiny space. Things got hot pretty quickly.

Picking just the right strawberry takes years of experience.

Here comes the liquid nitrogen.

Bananas ready to be frozen to -321 °F.

Liquid nitrogen boils as a banana is frozen. The average banana needed 3-4 minutes until it was frozen solid.

Probably not the appropriate safety gloves.

Ready to smash.

Bombs Away!

The white “smoke” is water vapor in the air condensing as the frozen fruit pass through it.

Strawberries in mid flight.

Using a 135mm lens gave us a tiny sliver of focus.