You pulled on our heart strings with your award-winning music video for Keaton Henson’s track Small Hands which was movingly sad and rather dark. Sandy on the other hand is a wonderful romp full of sand, smiles and sauciness. Did the narrative come about in direct response to your earlier work?

I guess Writing Sandy was a response to the whole pitching process. Working as a director is really brilliant fun, but it also gets frustrating when you go for weeks not actually producing work. So Sandy was a bit of an escape for me I guess! A chance to imagine I was a kid on a beach again. Nothing more carefree than that right?

This looks like a looong animation production, was it shot in camera and what was the process? Was anything sped up digitally? And what was behind your decision to shoot this style of animation?

We shot it over 8 months using stop frame animation…no tricks involved. It was a long shoot done simply frame by frame. We used motion control for all the camera moves to give it an extra level of sophistication.

Style wise, I love boats and sand and the sea so it really all just fell quite quickly into place. We then spent months refining and making things look just right.

What was the process of making the characters?

The characters were designed by myself and then modelled and cast out of silicone by a wonderful group of puppet makers. We shot it at Clapham Road Studios in South London and did all the post at Blink Studio.