I only peripherally thought of Rustboy and I'm sure Brian Taylor will be flattered that Mr. Beerens thought of him!

Stijn: *Phew!*

Actually, at the start I thought more of Harry Potter! :)

Stijn: HAHAHA! I told Michiel so!

Hey, it was quite cool getting that Debussy guy to record a soundtrack for you, eh? I bet he doesn't do that often! :)

Stijn: Yeah, Debussy is a relaxed guy, we know him well from the pub.

Talking of drinking, the drunk robot that looks like Bender from Futurama - is he saying anything intelligible or is it just random?

We had the real Bender first, but changed him to something like a walking distillery because Michiel was afraid we'd get into trouble with the sharky lawyers from the Fox network. Now he's Bender's nephew or something. He's saying something like Heeeaaahhee Druuuuunk...

Tell me about the clean robotic stuff on your showreel.

Stijn: The bits with the round, flying cameras, the fish and the jellyfish, and the beetle are all from a music video.

We did it for (and with) friends of ours, who have a production company called Post Panic. We'd done a short commercial with them, about 10 seconds long that has a similar look (it's on the reel as well). They asked us if we'd like to do a videoclip with them in the same vein but bigger, so we jumped on it.

It's extremely nice to work with them because they know exactly what they are looking for, and everything they do looks good, so it's gratifying to see our 3D integrated with their beautifully shot footage. The idea with the video was that there's a big company (Gouryella), which creates artificial life, so everything you see in the world is actually made by this company...

Michiel: We animated the beetle, the fish, the jellyfish and the big machine in the video, and the ending shot.

So all those parts of the reel were the work you did for that particular video? Was it broadcast?

The music video was broadcast on national music channels. We're told that it was a hit in Japan ;-)

Who was the music video for and how did you get to do the work?

Stijn: The video was done for a Dutch Eurohouse-artist called Ferry Korsten. We're told he's quite big, but since we're not into trance at all, we have no idea... The production company, PostPanic, was asked to do the video, as they had already done the previous one, and they asked us to help out with it.

What's the car exhaust sequence on your demo reel?

It's the opening shot for a video by a friend of ours, their band is called Green Lizard. The shot was from behind the car, THROUGH the car, out the grille, and back on the windshield with the passengers in plain view.

It's lovely! I really like the honeycomb bit...

Michiel: Me too - it was a lucky shot I guess, although tunnel animation was our first expertise to begin with :) It was also my first (true) DOF render.

Lemonade is possibly best-known for the short Robots. Tell me more about it.

Robots was the first thing we did when we started Lemonade in the beginning of 2001. It was originally done for the Dutch broadcasting company VPRO. We tried to keep it as simple as possible so we could focus on the animation instead of modeling, texturing and rigging. We had a very simple workflow. We'd done the moving storyboard in 3D first, and saved the scene files, so we could just take those scenes, animate them and replace the sequences in the moving storyboard. The sound was done previously by our Sound Guy, Mickey Smid.

Robots will be used as a showcase in the upcoming book "Inspired 3D short Film Production" published by Premier Press, written by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia.

What are you working on now?

Right now we're modelling some characters for a Dutch show that's going to be completely motion captured. We're not really at liberty to talk about it though ;)

We're also doing pre-production for a new short film. This film is set in a world where, when you're born, a seed is planted in the forest, and when you die; your coffin is being made from that same tree. Everyone has a tree, and the lives of the people and those trees are intertwined. It will (probably) be finished this fall.

Can people see Tinny Tom now?

Yes! It can be seen as a 60MB Mpeg right here.

Thanks for the chat!

See more of their work at: http://www.lemonade.nl