It’s a big dill. Literally. In its latest surreal turn through the fast-food zeitgeist, Mother LA has cooked up a new campaign for SONIC, launching the SONIC x Grillo’s Pickles Big Dill Meal—a limited-time combo designed for the pickle-obsessed. The campaign, titled “Pickle the World,” leans into full-throttle absurdity, complete with falling pickles, talking pickles, and a CEO-turned-pickle.
The campaign supports the national rollout of the Big Dill Meal, available at SONIC locations starting June 30. The meal includes:
- SONIC x Grillo’s Pickles Big Dill Double & Triple SONIC Smasher™
- Picklerita Slush
- Seasoned Tots or Groovy Fries, all Grillo’s-style
Directed with a deadpan bite, the spot opens on SONIC’s fictional CEO declaring a new age of pickle domination. From there, the world turns briny. Pickles fall from the sky. Customers flee. A woman cradles a pickle-dog like a newborn. The SONIC van transforms into a picklemobile, and the CEO himself morphs into a fully-formed pickle with eyebrows. Watching gleefully is Grillo’s mascot, Sam-Sam the Pickle Man, animated to life. Check it out below:
VFX by Covert
To pull off the visual chaos, Covert delivered an extensive CG and VFX package, building on its growing relationship with both SONIC and Mother LA. This marks the team’s second campaign with the brand.
Covert created the fully CG Sam-Sam the Pickle Man using a mechanical pickle reference provided by Grillo’s. The team developed a custom animation rig and lighting pipeline to ground the character in each live-action plate, refining him with shot-specific lighting and shading that matched the real-world environments.
For the CEO transformation, Covert blended live-action performance with full-body tracking, prop integration, and hybrid compositing. Their goal was to preserve the tactile rigidity of an actual pickle while still allowing subtle human movements and expressions to come through.
The team also pickle-fied the surrounding world, integrating CG-enhanced weather systems, airborne pickles, and background details. All effects were seamlessly composited using a blend of Nuke, Blender, and Cinema 4D, ensuring the bizarre visuals felt perfectly at home in SONIC’s brine-soaked reality.
Covert’s VFX brought balance to the spot’s surrealism, ensuring that even its wildest gags had believable texture, weight, and lighting to sit naturally in the environment.
From pickle phones to pickle precipitation, “Pickle the World” isn’t just a brand extension—it’s an all-in brine-drenched fantasy.
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