McDonald's: Bursting

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.