WHEN you think of places where international TV shows are made, you may think of London, Bristol or Manchester.

But LoveLove Films, based in Winton, is putting Bournemouth on the map with their award-winning animated children’s show Pop Paper City.

The show follows the adventures of five friends, Plom, Mae-Mae, Hooper, Phoebe and Zip, as they craft their way through the challenges they are met with.

The show is distributed by animation heavyweights Aardman to 177 territories worldwide including to Warner Bros Discovery in the USA, ABC in Australia, China, Vietnam and Poland.

The studio was founded by Georgina Hurcombe, a Bournemouth University graduate, in 2010, after she was made redundant.

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The company has since done projects including music videos for Joss Stone and Run DMC, TV commercials, broadcast graphics for Williams Formula One team, SAS Who Dares Wins and EasyJet in the Cockpit.

But, in 2018, the studio was making a lot of retirement videos and Georgina decided the studio needed a new direction.

“We had a really good, strong animators, and we got to a point where we were like, we've kind of lost our direction,” she said.

“We don't want to be really making retirement videos. I mean, they're okay, but I didn't go into the business to make retirement videos.

“We all sat down as a business and chatted about what we wanted to do.

“I closed the studio for about six months, used all of our savings that we had acquired to develop a load of children's tv ideas.”

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The team went to markets with their ideas, like Cannes, to pitch them to studios.

“Pop Paper City, as soon as we took it to market, just everyone sat up,” Georgina said. “They all really liked it.

“Aardman came on board as our distributor. They suddenly started pitching to us, which was a really strange experience where there's a company like Aardman that is obviously really well respected and loved by everyone for Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the sheep and Timmy Time, the great shows that they make.”

The show went into production in 2021, with the final 11-minute episode of 52 airing in December 2023.

Now, the studio is fundraising for series two and a feature film, while producing merchandise and toys.

Studio manager, George Caton-Goult, said the production process was a ‘learning process’ as its teams grew from 15 to 150.

“For us as a company, to go from managing that small environment to a bigger one was largely a process of learning and trial and error and getting to the right point, which I think we definitely did during that production,” he said.

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One of the draws for potential hires throughout the process was Bournemouth.

“Whilst we were recruiting, one of the biggest draws is we made a pack which was all about the resort that we would send out,” Georgina said.

“Everyone was so drawn by the beach and the New Forest and all the activities.

“So that was a massive draw, I think, to a lot of young talent that wasn't from the area, was seeing kind of the beautiful beaches and the landscape that we have in Dorset.”

While many of the staff hired were from Bournemouth’s universities, some moved to the town from as far afield as Italy to work on the show, with many making their homes in the town.

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The studio was keen to keep as much production as possible in Bournemouth, with only the sound design done elsewhere.

“That was really important,” George said.

“This company for the entire time it's been run, has been by ex-Bournemouth University students.

“It was really cool and important for us to be able to keep it here, even though obviously with the show we had loads of people from everywhere.”

The team hired children as young as five for the roles of the characters, with Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed voicing Helping Hand.

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Georgina said Nick was ‘amazing’ and that the studio was ‘delighted’ to work with him.

The pair said the response to the show has been fantastic, with Georgina saying one of the most surreal things in producing the show was being sent the dubs for other languages.

“It's quite surreal listening to Vietnamese or Mandarin or Polish, and that's really exciting because you're just thinking, wow, our series is traveling globally.”

Despite the international appeal, the show is grounded and inspired by Dorset.

“I think the good thing about Dorset is you do have so many different environments that you can relate to,” Georgina said.

“I think that is something that did weave its fabric. You can definitely see reflections of where we are in our storylines that we tell within the series.”

Pop Paper City is shown on Channel 5 Milkshake in the UK.