Andrea Love uses wool to "paint" pictures, make felt figures, and create animated films. She works as a freelancer in Washington state, from her basement studio. Clients often come to her for commercials and short documentary films. One of her projects was a 4½-minute documentary for the Northwest Straits Initiative. The organization is dedicated to preserving the waters and beaches of the northwest corner of the U.S. For the film, Love created water, waves, boats, birds, a seal and fully dressed human figures—all out of wool fibers and felt.
Love is a master of stop-motion animation. She cooks tiny felted meals in felt kitchens and has characters play felt violins. Wool fibers become steam from a felt coffee cup, filled with felt coffee. She even makes a tiny felt vase on a felt pottery wheel. It seems that nothing can't be made from wool fibers in Love's hands.
Recently, Love and children's book author/illustrator Phoebe Wahl created a short feature film, Tulip. The story is an updated version of the classic fairy tale, "Thumbelina". The 9-minute film took over a year to make. It has won a number of awards at film festivals and is now available to rent or buy from Vimeo. Love and Wahl plan to continue their collaboration on future projects.
The original King Kong movie in 1933 is considered to be the first major milestone in stop-motion animated films. You might want to show a bit of this clip of Kong on top of the Empire State Building to show the early history of stop-motion.
The classic "Thumbelina" is about an old woman who is lonely and a witch gives her a tiny girl born from a tulip. The girl is then captured by a toad to marry his son. After that, she escapes, is captured again by another animal, escapes again, meets lots of other animals, and eventually marries the fairy prince. Tulip changes the story to give Thumbelina more agency in her life, and at the end she returns to her mother to live happily ever after with her, removing the outdated marriageability theme.