How did the more traditional actor-driven approach integrate with the digital process?

There are animators out there that say that motion-capture is cheating. I don't subscribe to that ideology. I believe in using the right tools for the job. And in this case actors were the way to go. All of the motion in the film comes from performance capture of the actors on a sound stage mixed with key frame animation of their faces and some props. As much as possible we used what the actors provided. The performance capture shoot went incredibly smoothly. We shot the whole film in one day. We had rehearsed enough to get into the zone very quickly and then we could hone and adjust that until we got the gold. The great thing about motion-capture is being able to work an entire scene all at once, not having to set up for different angles and lighting set ups. We had an additional four HD video cameras capturing reference footage for us to edit with. We then used that video as reference for the facial key frame animation we did later. Key frame animation comes down to selecting the key moments of the actor's performance and recreating those in our 3D head rig. That distillation process tends to amplify and exaggerate. Mixed with the full body motion-capture, and performance sound-recorded on the day, it has worked well for this story. We have completely created a world, and the characters in it but the intensity and subtlety of human performance drives every frame of Poppy.