From seed to screen: How Tesco grew its green(s) giant

The towering fruit-and-veg hero of Tesco’s new Free Fruit and Veg for Schools campaign, is a larger-than-life blend of CGI and live action — and a remarkable feat of craft. Created by BBH, director Nick Ball through MJZ, and Untold Studios, the character was made up not of one single asset but multiple free-flowing items of fruit and veg that vary with every shot.

With his biggest physical form using more than 105,000 pieces of fruit and veg, a custom rig for child actor Theo to ride on, a digital double, and six months of post-production, this project was no small potatoes.

How did the concept behind Tesco’s charitable initiative come about?

Felipe Guimaraes Tesco’s ambition to improve access to fruit and veg for kids is part of that its mission to be helpful. The Fruit Giant is a simple, powerful metaphor for giving. 

We even coined the term ‘fruit resolution’ to guide the process

We wanted to show the scale of Tesco’s ambition, while still telling a story grounded in the communities it wants to help. With that in mind we spoke a lot at the start of the project about wanting the film to feel like Pixar, but set in the UK. Real streets; British schools – because how magical could that be?

Above: The Tesco campaign's hero spot follows a jolly fruit and veg giant who journeys across the UK dispensing healthy foodstuffs, symbolising the generosity driving the project. What was the character design story behind the new brand entity ‘Plumbert’?

FG: It took six weeks of concepting and experimentation to land on how Plumbert would look. Across that time, we had around ten decks filled with over 200 sketches, 3D builds, model-making studies, and fruit layouts. We all stared at lots of fruit bowls and still life paintings of fruit and veg.

Untold assembled a bespoke global team for the project spanning concept artists, 3D animators and VFX artists. Each person brought a distinct craft, and together they worked seamlessly to shape the character.

Untold creates characters all the time, but building one entirely from fruit and veg was new territory. It required constant trial and error: carefully considering the placement of each piece, the colouring of his face and body, and how everything would move. Would the fruit stay fixed, or shift and rumble as he walked? When he shrinks after giving himself away to kids, how would everything remain in proportion?

I always wanted him to feel like he'd been assembled by the produce aisle itself rather than a character designer.

We even coined the term ‘fruit resolution’ to guide the process, ensuring every piece of fruit stayed true to its real-life size while forming his features and sitting believably alongside real-world objects. We were very tough on ourselves. Never cheating to get where we wanted to go. 

And his name was chosen by Tesco colleagues but it’s actually the name the original concept artist gave him. She created him, so it’s fitting that her name stuck.

Nick Ball: The brief to ourselves was a sort of Iron Giant meets Totoro with a healthy dose of the Volcano from [Pixar film] Lava...if he was made of parsnips and came from Preston.

The moment he starts looking too clean or too perfect he stops being a giant made of groceries and becomes a piece of VFX work.

I always wanted him to feel like he'd been assembled by the produce aisle itself rather than a character designer. His body is essentially a sack of fruit that's lost the sack. Round, soft, fallible and always a bit unstable. Not a lot of him is fixed, you'll see his arms gather when needed, the fruit and veg that make him up are always in a bit of flux.

The moment he starts looking too clean or too perfect he stops being a giant made of groceries and becomes a piece of VFX work. Those are very different things in my mind. And we were very deliberate about his face.

 At his biggest, Plumbert is 22ft tall.

 There's a tendency with CG characters to give them a huge expressive range, to show off what's possible, but I think that can actually really work against you. We kept him relatively still emotionally. The warmth had to come through the eyes and the body, not a big performance. Restraint was the brief, weirdly.

Above: Plumbert's appearance necessitated six weeks of concepting and experimentation. The team had around ten decks filled with over 200 sketches, 3D builds, model-making studies.

Can you share details of how iterations of the giant were built? For example, the amount of fruit and veg used to make the largest version…

FG: The character development process was an iterative one, and we all spent weeks poring over sketches, clay models, and early greyscale renders in the lead up to the shoot. 

He’s made of life-size pieces of fruit and veg - 86 varieties to be precise. Each one was precisely modelled and built in CGI, with motion testing to see how they all interact with the weather (and each other) as Plumbert goes on his journey. At his biggest, Plumbert is 22ft tall. Everything from the size of his footprints to the shoulder Theo sits on is realistically represented in the film.

[Kids] haven't yet built up the self-consciousness that makes imaginary relationships feel weird and embarrassing.

NB: Scale was something we had to think about constantly. The trick was making his diminishment something that crept up on you, and if we were smart about it the audience wouldn't even be thinking about it. You'd just be inside the story between the boy and the giant. Every size decision fed back into that. It was never really about the spectacle of how big he was. It was about whether you believed in him at every size.

Above: Marvel at the curious fruit kebab involved in the production of the ad. 

The project blends CGI with live action – what were the challenges you needed to overcome to portray Theo’s interaction with Plumbert?

FG: The biggest consideration was how to make Theo and Plumbert’s relationship feel natural. Character development was a huge part of shoot planning and pre-production. The size of the Giant, Plumbert’s gait and movement, and how he actually interacts with Theo were all important in choreographing each shot.

Everything was considered, from the sway and motion of the green-screen rigs (to make the shoulder-riding scenes as realistic as possible), through to making sure our kids were acting to the correct eyeline for our giant at each stage of his journey. We even made sure our talent weren’t scared of heights as part of the audition process.

NB: It was all about crafting genuine performances. Kids are actually better at this than adults in some ways. They haven't yet built up the self-consciousness that makes imaginary relationships feel weird and embarrassing. But I think it's still important to give them something real to hook onto, so we used a great actor mate of mine, Charlie Rawes, as a stand-in giant on a cherry picker, giving Theo something genuinely present to work against. That's all of Charlie's patented grunting in the finished ad.

But the deeper challenge is that you're making decisions almost entirely on faith. You're protecting emotional beats on set that don't fully exist yet.

Beyond that it's an eyeline marker on a huge fishing pole, a very odd fruit kebab that appeared from time to time, and when needed, me doing an extremely undignified impression of a giant off to the side of the camera.

 But the deeper challenge is that you're making decisions almost entirely on faith. You're protecting emotional beats on set that don't fully exist yet, trusting they'll survive months of work ahead.