Directed by Fx Goby (Nexus Studios) and animated by Mighty Nice, this charming series of spots for insurance company Lemonade, blends live-action, stop-motion, 2D, and 3D animation.

The campaign embraces innovation without losing a human touch, using handmade aesthetics to make a fully digital experience feel warm, intuitive and inviting. Fx directed these visually rich films to feel cohesive yet individually distinct. From the textural richness of a woollen jumper to the cosmic scale of an infinite music library, each spot brings its own tone while remaining unified under a shared sense of craft, playfulness, and imagination.

“Both through my creative work and by serving on award juries, I’m fortunate to be exposed to some incredible work. These experiences speak to what I loved about this campaign — we set out to create something different than anything on the market. And I think we succeeded. These films celebrate the beauty of instantaneity, how tech can shrink time, while keeping things deeply human. We brought warmth, texture, and craft to powerful algorithms.”

– Fx Goby, Director, Nexus Studios

"Jazz isn't a genre, it's a vibe."

- Mike Lomas, Creative Lead

Our first film takes us on a robot's journey through a city of vinyl records that we find amongst the clouds, travelling deep into the archives to find the perfect song. An abstract interpretation of what happens when you choose a song on your streaming service, and how smooth and easy it is.

We were provided with some amazing concept frames from Fx and his design team. Quite graphical and detailed 2D artwork, with the challenge to bring into the 3D world but staying true to the images.

Each building was constructed using individual records, so we needed to create something that allowed you to see it was made of small objects, but still gave us a sense of scale.

Our solution was to develop some methods of dynamically scattering the objects, allowing us to change scale and density per object, and something that allowed for us to scatter around curved surfaces. We also needed to recreate the feel of the 2D artwork, which had a lot of colour variation and shading. We set up projection mapped surfaces that could be sampled to drive the colours of the vinyls, and created a series of mattes to create further variation during the compositing stage.

The second film in the campaign is a colour saturated 3D spot featuring a zany series of pipes and sweet characters, all chasing some swooping and zooming dollar notes with an energetic camera. The team crafted a genuinely fun visual metaphor for the idea of money changing hands.

The colours are juicy and the textures across the 3D scenes are slick, poppy and modern. The overall design is simple, but there is a superb level of detail and craft put into all of the models and motions which gave it a fun but luxe edge.

“I don’t get to work with texture as much in the land of hand crafted animation - or if I do it usually leans into traditional artistic materials. Getting time to lean into 3D, realistic textures was such a joy and a novelty for me. I really enjoyed spending a lot of time pouring over the woollen felt texture of the mafia boss' hand at the beginning of the spot - as well as his flashy diamond ring!”

- Bonnie Forsyth, Creative Lead

A lovely spot with a hand-made feeling, ‘Purchase Online’ follows a cute miniature knitted sweater flying across the globe. We built the sweater and rigged it for stop motion, then shot that on green screen in our studio using a variety of setups, following a carefully timed CG animatic as a guide.

For the shoot we used a mix of motion-controlled sliders and orbital rigs, wide lenses and a huge green screen for those expansive flying shots. For the model we built several iterations with various attachment points to minimise cleanup in post. We then proceeded to shoot cloud elements for every shot, as well as creating matte paintings based on the style frames. Every shot was brought together in Nuke using 3D planes for a nice impression of depth and parallax, as well as adding finishing touches.

“I love travelling and crafting, they are two of my favourite things in the universe, so naturally I was thrilled to jump onboard for this project."

- Gary Fouchy, Creative Lead