From the release:
It’s with heartfelt pleasure that Hornet welcomes Andrea Love to the Hornet director roster. Andrea is an animator and director who specializes in stop motion animation with needle felted wool.
Her work is truly one of a kind. Beyond the uncommon craft, Andrea suffuses her style with a laundry list of attributes all her own: a self-taught and unadulterated aesthetic, an obsessively delicate devotion to detail, and a zen-master empathy & patience when it comes to the development of her characters.
The result is a body of work that is both mind-bending and majorly satisfying.
Andrea’s journey into the world of animation is refreshingly roundabout. She taught herself animation on the side while receiving a BA in video production and film studies from Hampshire College. After university, she made the pilgrimage to the Olympic Peninsula where she initially worked on farms before gradually taking animation odd jobs in the offseason for various small businesses.
Gradually, then combustively, she grew a following — at first just in the town of Port Townsend where she currently lives and works; then on Instagram, where she has over 670k loyal subscribers.
Today, Andrea’s portfolio is filled with an inviting mix of narrative shorts, commercial projects, and documentary films. Her 2020 film Tulip—a fresh and wooly reimagining of the classic fairytale Thumbelina—was officially selected at Annecy International Animation Festival and won an Audience Award at the New York International Children’s Festival. Elder was her first large-scale commercial job—a sweet and sensitive take on live-in care. And her personal series Cooking with Wool delights in its convivial charm.
For Andrea, wool as a medium lends itself to stories that take place in natural worlds: landscapes, water, organic scenes. It works well with character-driven stories since puppets are so engaging. And it’s also refreshingly understated. There isn’t any over-the-top exaggeration. Instead, with wool stop motion, everything is a bit more subtle and subdued, shrewd and sublime. It’s the perfect material for expressing nuance and naturalism.
It’s also the perfect material to support Andrea’s efforts to be more eco-conscious in her work. “I love fiber both for its tactile and fuzzy texture, but also because it is a natural material. Sheep need to be sheared in order to protect their health and hygiene, making it renewable and sustainable. My family and I strive to live sustainably with a low carbon footprint and care deeply about mitigating the environmental costs of climate change.”
With a full-service animation studio in her basement, Andrea has always had a hand in all aspects of production, from fabrication through animation. But she’s also excited about what the Hornet partnership might mean for her process.
“I’m interested in collaborating with other artists, storyboard artists, set designers, and so on. Maybe even working in the Hornet studio on certain projects. Living in Port Townsend can be super isolating sometimes. I’m excited about the opportunity to work in tandem with larger crews and expand my production capabilities.”
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