Characterful, quirky, and meticulously crafted animation helped Aardman , the British company behind Wallace & Gromit, build an international fan base and Oscars success. The studio’s new feature, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (it’ll be called Pirates! Band of Misfits, in the U.S.), stars the voices of Hugh Grant, Jeremy Piven, and Salma Hayek. The stop-motion film, which tells the story of a band of pirates who get into an adventure with Charles Darwin, is the company’s most elaborate and ambitious yet. As impressive as Aardman’s animations, though, has been its ability to grow without destroying what made it special in the first place–the feeling that its productions are a labor of love made by two men in a shed.

The reality could not be more different. The company, based in purpose-built premises on a business park just north of Bristol, is today home to a full-time staff of around 120 (which swells to 700 when feature film production is in full swing) and an array of disciplines–from storyboarding, model-making, and set construction to CGI, editing facilities, production departments specializing in TV, commercials and digital, and rights and licensing.

“In the beginning there was just the two of us,” says cofounder and executive chairman David Sproxton, who launched Aardman in 1972 with his school friend Peter Lord. Here, Sproxton talks about how the studio grew from that creative partnership with its creative genius intact, aka the Wallace & Gromit guide to a cracking creative culture.

An early break for Sproxton and Lord was making animated shorts for BBC Children’s Television. Their first successful character was a stop-frame animated plasticine character called Morph. The launch of British TV station Channel 4 back in 1982 proved an important catalyst when it began commissioning animation for a grown-up audience, and the pair began experimenting with animating recorded conversations of real people–a groundbreaking technique. Aardman’s subsequent Lip Sync series for Channel 4 included Creature Comforts–the Oscar-winning short made by Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit, who joined Aardman in 1985.

“In the early days we had an accountant who’d say ‘Just do the best work you can and the money will look after itself,’ and that’s broadly how it still works today,” Sproxton continues. “Though as a business we’re much larger in scale now, we’re not big and corporate–that’s just not us. We’re not just finance-driven. We’re about trying to get the best out of people, getting everyone to muck in, recognizing that everyone’s creative and encouraging them to be so. It’s all about coming up with the best creative ideas.”

A perpetual balancing act for Aardman today is being busy but not flat out. It’s a challenge many smaller, less established production businesses would surely envy but one that Sproxton has paid particular attention to since Aardman’s ill-fated tie-up with DreamWorks in the mid-’90s.

Back in 1997, Aardman and DreamWorks joined forces to co-finance and distribute animated feature Chicken Run. Two years later, the pair announced a $250m deal to make a further four films over the next 12 years. In 2006, however, this arrangement was terminated prematurely because, some speculated at the time, of a clash of creative cultures. “Looking back, I think we were a little too risky for their business plan,” is all Sproxton will now say.