John French’s diaries were discovered in the loft of a family member’s house many years after he died of tuberculosis in 1929, and are now stored at the Cornish archive centre Kresen Kernow in Redruth.
Pupils fed the stories from the diaries as well as visual descriptions of the trenches into a generative AI programme to make the film.
His niece Penny Picton was invited to the school to tell the story of her uncle and the discovery of the diaries.
She said: “For someone who left school at 14 to work in a mine his writing was amazing – he was well loved by his 10 siblings and because of these diaries he’ll be well remembered.”
She said she was moved to tears when she watched the film.
The films formed part of the school’s entry for the Malcolm Doolin Prize for Local History research awarded by The Western Front Association, which it won.