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Behind the scenes of Zestron: Why we made a short film

Behind the scenes of Zestron: Why we made a short film

Maddie Mack
by Maddie Mack
September 17, 2026

What matters to us at Lemonly? Lots of things — great coffee, a solid office playlist, and a well-stocked snack cabinet all come to mind. But on a larger scale, we care about clear, creative storytelling. 

Our 3D short film Zestron is one of the most ambitious stories we’ve ever taken on. It gave us the chance to stretch out our storytelling skills, deepen our technical toolbox, and invest in our team. It also happens to be a really fun time.

Watch our behind-the-scenes feature with Zestron creators Nicholas Schnell and Ty MacConnell sharing more about the process, lessons learned, and Easter eggs you might’ve missed.

Stepping up our storytelling

We’re used to telling our clients’ stories through visuals, animation, and consistent messaging — but what about through narratives? Metaphors? Emotional arcs? Zestron gave us the opportunity to do it all — in full 3D and with hardly any dialogue.

A new way of telling branded stories

Zestron goes beyond a typical branded story, like a case study or company history. Rather than using visuals to explain a complex topic — our bread and butter — we’re using visuals (and very few words) to create a world, communicate a story, and convey emotion.

Now, to be clear, the specific story beats in Zestron don’t actually reflect Lemonly’s company or brand history. (Unfortunately, we don’t have any real lemon robots buzzing around our office solving fuel shortages. Believe us, you’d know if we did.)

But those beats do mirror how we think about our creative process and problem-solving approach on a metaphorical level: When our clients find themselves in a marketing rut, we leverage our signature “lemons-to-lemonade” process to find zesty solutions. (Sort of like Zestron himself using lemons to make literal lemonade and help his human buddy Ron solve Citropolis’s fuel crisis — get it?)

Exploring environmental storytelling

Zestron also features a strong emotional arc that we explored through environmental storytelling. Basically, environmental storytelling is the use of physical or virtual spaces to narrate a story rather than through dialogue or text. The goal is to communicate history, character, and mood through worldbuilding and background details, letting the audience piece together what happened for themselves.

Zestron has almost no dialogue. Everything we needed to communicate about these characters had to come through body language, environment, and small details most viewers will never consciously notice, like a picture on a desk or a familiar-looking prosthetic arm.

For example, some of these details tell the background story of Ron’s mom, the renowned inventor Amelia Rickard. She’s never mentioned by name in the film, but you can find traces of her on Ron’s desk and in his shop at the end of the film. She built Zestron to help Ron carry on her work when she couldn't, and the robotic arm she'd made for herself after losing her own became his.

None of that is spelled out in the film, but it’s in there, and it creates a rich backstory that viewers can feel, even if they don’t know it.

Composite of three images showing the development of a junkyard scene from sketch to blocking to final 3D render

Building up our technical toolset

While we didn’t get to try on any robotic arms of our own, Zestron provided the perfect opportunity for our team to deepen our expertise with the latest and greatest animation tools.

Blender: Our 3D workhorse

Keeping up with the latest tech is crucial for teams like ours because animation is constantly evolving. New tools are popping up all the time, and older tools are regularly updated with new software and capabilities. For example, Blender introduced a new lighting tool about halfway through our process, and we had to decide whether to go back and use it. We did, and it was totally worth it.

Those kinds of updates are exactly why Blender is one of the most exciting animation tools in the industry. It’s free, open-source, and combines every step of the pipeline into a single cohesive program. It rivals expensive commercial software by offering a regularly updated toolset for modeling, sculpting, rendering, animation, and visual effects. We use it regularly for client projects, and it’s basically how we built the whole world of Zestron.

3D graybox prototype showing a scene modeled with simple geometric shapes

Substance Painter: A game-changer for texturing

But of course, Blender wasn’t the only technical tool we used. We use Adobe’s Substance Painter to add texture to each piece of the environment and add the gritty, retro-futuristic vibe we knew we needed to nail for this story. Texturing adds all-important realism to every surface you see on screen. Those material properties, luster, and wear help the world feel lived-in.

Collage of 3D artwork showing how color and texture were applied to models

DaVinci Resolve: Compiling and editing the final cut

Once we had our 3D world built and textured, we used DaVinci Resolve for compositing, which means combining layers of footage to make it look cohesive. Every scene in Zestron was rendered from Blender as a PNG sequence — basically thousands of individual image files. DaVinci compiled those sequences into video clips, which we could arrange on a timeline alongside our other scenes.

The final step in creating the look was using DaVinci's color grading tools to make final adjustments to each clip — balancing the lighting, refining the palette, and ensuring the whole film felt consistent from scene to scene.

Timeline view of DaVinci Resolve showing how the short film was edited

Ableton Live: Soundtracking the world of Zestron

With the look locked in, the last piece was sound. Composing music happens to be one of Nicholas’ passions, so he wrote and produced Zestron’s original soundtrack in Ableton. His compositions play a huge part in setting the film’s tone: The music is upbeat when times are good, suspenseful when they aren’t, and leans into an electronic sound throughout to match our robot protagonist. There are hints of flute, strings, and piano, but everything feels like it belongs to Zestron’s world.

Every step of the process deepened our team’s fluency with industry-standard tools, and that knowledge is already showing up in the work we do for clients.

View of instrumental tracks in Ableton Live showing how the music of Zestron was composed

Investing in our team

We pride ourselves on our process, but it goes without saying that the process wouldn’t go very far without talented, passionate people working hard to hone their skills. When our teammates believe in something and make a strong case for it, we like to get on board.

Nicholas and art director Ty MacConnell came in with a strong pitch for their creative vision, and the final product is already paying off. Zestron kept us up to date on the latest industry innovations, and we’re already incorporating the techniques we learned into some extra sweet client work.

Living out our core values

Ultimately, creating Zestron stands out as one of our proudest accomplishments — letting us champion our team’s growth while putting our core values into practice along the way.

Adventure

A short film is a new frontier for us. While we’ve been doing 3D work for a while, Zestron is our most ambitious project to date in its scale and level of detail. This opportunity allowed our team to explore new technologies and modes of storytelling.

Integrity

Integrity means practicing what you preach. We say we value giving creatives the space to stretch their skills, and Zestron was a prime opportunity to put that into practice. It was an ambitious undertaking. Having the team’s support and buy-in made sure the final project was something to truly be proud of. 

Collaboration

While Nicholas and Ty are the real champions of this project, almost everyone at Lemonly was involved with the production of Zestron in some capacity. Designers helped create 2D assets to fill in the world of Citropolis. Our account service team kept tabs on the project’s progress and kept production capacity a priority. The marketing crew whipped up a whole campaign to make sure the release made a splash. Even our culture team (Vitamin C) got in on the fun, planning a very special private screening event for the Lemonheads, our families, and friends.

Lemonly team at the State Theatre under a projected "Zestron" graphic on the curtain

See the world of Citropolis for yourself

As fun as Zestron was to make, it’s even more fun to watch. Check out the short film and find more behind-the-scenes extras that show how it all came together.

More 3D animation from Lemonly

See more work

Frequently asked questions

Zestron is a 3D animated short film by Lemonly. Set in the near future, it tells the story of Zestron, a robot, and his human friend Ron as they face a fuel shortage in the city of Citropolis.

Visit the official website to watch the short film and get a behind-the-scenes peek at how we made it, from character concept to final 3D render.


3D and 2D are just different animation styles. Both have an incredible range to depict all sorts of visuals, environments, characters, you name it. Animating in 3D introduces some unique opportunities and challenges compared to 2D, like lighting and textures. Because 3D models also exist in, well, three dimensions, it can feel more immersive.

The process of animating in 3D is a bit different from the 2D animation process. In 3D, starting with graybox animation after the sketch storyboards helps model the world in 3D space and establish the basic camera movements. Texturing is also a major step; that’s when we apply material properties and surface details to objects to paint a realistic look.


Animation appears in lots of our work — infographics, microcontent, presentations, microsites — not just video. Animated explainer videos are one of our specialties, but we also create eye-catching videos in live-action and mixed-media styles. 2D or 3D, sleek or playful, our animation pros can handle it all.


We thought you’d never ask. Reach out to us to book a friendly intro call. We’ll talk about your vision for your next creative project, share more about our process and investment, and more. 


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