See Reason, See Raisin
for
Raisin
With
Ponderosa
Raisin's first ever TV ad, from Ponderosa, is a deadpan comedy about a man who has put off sorting his savings for so long he ends up waist-deep in desert quicksand, and later lost at sea in a rowing boat. For the joke to work, both places had to look enormous. Taking a cast out to a real desert or onto open water is a big undertaking for one campaign, and it's usually the point where a script starts getting scaled back. We kept the whole thing in our studio. The desert and the sea played on our LED wall behind the cast, and our own AI augmentation carried them out to the horizon, past where the wall stops. The sink and the rowing boat were real, built on the studio floor, and it was all shot in two days.
The comedy only works if it's played completely straight, which is why we pitched it with director Simon Neal. His humour is very dry, and he'd already directed the Powersheds idents with us, so he knew how to work on a hybrid set.
Michael's sink is a platform with a hidden lift that lowers him about half a foot on camera. He lowers himself as it goes, which makes it look twice as deep. With the desert playing on the wall behind him, he could see where he was stuck and the light from it fell on him, so the reactions are to a real place in front of him.
We pre-tested every setup in Unreal before the shoot, which meant the two days went on getting the performances right. The match cut into the Raisin blue world was shot last, once everyone knew where the cuts would fall.
The wall covers what's behind the cast, but not the sand or water under their feet or the edges of the really wide shots, and a lot of this film is wide. On the day we shot a clean plate of every set-up, so post had an empty frame to build from.
For each wide, we generated a still of the finished world first, the ground, the desert running back to the horizon, and on the boat film the fog and the open sea. Our own AI augmentation then used the still and the original clip to build the moving version, and the real performance was masked back in on top, so the actors on screen are exactly the pixels we shot on the day.
It meant the film could still be directed in post. When Simon Neal wanted Michael sinking a little further as the shot went on, that change was made in the augmentation. Where the feet weren't in shot, like the wides in the blue world, we didn't need AI at all, just a mask and a blue gradient.
Andrew Beniston and Christian Holtappel led the VFX, compositing and grade, with the phone screens and signpost text tracked in separately, and graded the real and the built together so the film sits as one.
The close-ups we mostly left alone. That's where you're watching Michael's face, and it's where the joke lives.
Prolific North covered the campaign on 28th September 2026, Leeds virtual stage hosts fintech's debut TV campaign, telling the story of Raisin's first TV campaign being shot entirely on our virtual production stage in Leeds.
“Financial services ads don't have to be shot in a grey office. We wanted Raisin to feel bright and a bit cinematic, and VP let us put the cast somewhere properly beautiful while keeping full control of every frame.”
Simon Sturgeon, Tungsten Media
Raisin's Desert film went out on Sky AdSmart at the end of August, with the cutdowns and stills running across social and digital.
If you've got a script set somewhere that's hard to get to, a desert, open water, a city street you can't close for the day, this is how we'd approach it. We work out early what the performance needs in front of it, put the world on the wall, and finish whatever the wall can't reach in post. It works on everyday briefs too, a kitchen or a living room you'd otherwise build and dress in full, where only what's closest to camera needs to be there on the day.