A gritty drama set in a war zone nearly 100 years ago seems like a strange choice for a CGI short film. Why animation?

This was the first question I had to answer when I first met with the Writer. My answer was:

Poppy is a small and delicate story that is not like most war films. I saw that it needed simplicity and a delicate hand. Animation is all about distilling a subject down to its very essence. Great animation finds the heart of a subject and shows it clearly and simply for all to understand. By taking away all the complexity of a live-action WWI film I felt that the visual stylisations of animation could get to the heart of this small story, the heart of it's characters, and make for a stronger film.

There's another reason too, and it's that I think the medium of CGI has a lot more potential beyond just animations for kids and visual effects pyro-technics. When partnered with strong stories and great acting it opens up possibilities in telling stories that might otherwise be too difficult or not possible at all. I would like to push those boundaries.

How did you arrive at the visual style of the film?

The biggest problem to crack was finding the right look for the world of Poppy. So many decisions to make. What should the characters look like? How real? How much detail, how stylised...? Our initial concept sketches were quite gestural and rugged. This felt right for the tone of the story and what it was about. I started to look for the visual 3D equivalent of these sketches. Rodin was the answer, especially his later expressive bronzes. His amazing sculptures were like sketches but in solid form. That became the inspiration for the chiselled carved look of the characters. The key thing this does immediately is define the film as not trying to look real'. Through exaggeration I have enhanced the characters and story. The set design was also about finding the right balance between realism and stylisation. The close-up sets, the ground that characters touch and sit on, needed to be more realistic than I first expected. It needed that to give the characters more weight and presence. However, the distant background sets were able to be quite stylistic, like theatrical back-drops.