By SHOOT Staff

Hornet Finds Love
Animator and director Andrea Love, who specializes in stop motion animation with needle felted wool, has joined the talent roster at NY-based studio Hornet for representation in the U.S. and Canada. Beyond the uncommon craft, Love suffuses her style with attributes such as a self-taught and unadulterated aesthetic, an obsessively delicate devotion to detail, and a zen-master empathy and patience when it comes to the development of her characters.

Love’s body of work includes a mix of narrative shorts, commercial projects, and documentary films. Her 2020 film Tulip, a fresh and woolly 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 Love, 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. 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 Love’s efforts to be more eco-conscious in her work.

Love, who’s based in Port Townsend, Wash., maintains a full-service animation studio in her basement.

Zoic Gets Real
Zoic Studios has launched Real Time Group, leveraging Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to create a dynamic and interactive pipeline for digital filmmaking. The new division is focused on applying real-time production techniques to visualization, the virtual art department, animation and virtual production. 

Selected as an Epic Mega-Grants recipient in 2020, the Zoic team has worked to refine a parallel pipeline for pre-rendered and real time asset creation, currently deployed for series including Warner Bros’ Superman & Lois and Stargirl, as well as SEE for AppleTV+, The Boys for Amazon Prime Video and the upcoming Netflix series Sweet Tooth.

Most recently, Zoic’s Real Time Group employed its real-time visualization workflow to craft visual effects for the debut season of Superman & Lois. Zoic utilized Unreal to collaborate with the series’ creative team to achieve the cinematic quality of the action packed visual effects sequences on a tight broadcast schedule. This interactive visualization process not only optimized creative ideation, but also assisted seamless transition to postproduction, shifting pre-rendered assets created in Unreal to what would ultimately be seen in final frames. 

One of Us Opens Paris Studio
Headquartered in London’s Soho district, One of Us has spread its wings in Europe, opening a Paris VFX studio under the aegis of a long-time company collaborator, Emmanual (Manu) Pichereau. He will be joined by a mix of One of Us vets and the pick of his extensive French connections. Among Manu’s credits are Under The Skin, Anna Karenina, Everest, The Revenant, Netflix’s The Midnight Sky, and most recently The Matrix 4.
 
The Paris studio will use a hybrid remote and office-based team, leveraging the company’s London infrasturucture. Over the past few months, connectivity has been improved, storage has been tripled and the render farm has been extended. Recent innovations in remote working technology expands capacity and flexibility between the Paris and London studios.

One of Us’ expansion to Paris enables the company to tap into French tax production incentives, which begin at 30% and can rise to 40%.

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