After countless hours in her basement studio, Andrea Love is almost finished filming “The Messy Adventures of Mud,” a pilot episode she hopes will pique the interest of Hollywood execs.

“It is a proof-of-concept for a kids television series, and I am working with Sirena Irwin, who is a voice actor on Spongebob Squarepants,” said Love, a stop-motion cinematographer and owner of Andrea Animates. She specializes in characters and scenes created entirely of wool felt and has worked for a variety of local organizations including Jefferson Land Trust and Edensaw Woods.

“It is a like claymation, but out of felt,” Love explained.

Irwin is both the writer and director of the show, which follows the adventures of an orphaned 8-year-old girl named “Mud” who finds the family she needs in a community of misfits and wild animals living in the deep, magical woods of the Pacific Northwest.

The orphan girl — voice acted by Camryn Jones — learns that getting dirty and “kindnerosity” is all in a day’s play.

Irwin spent time in the Pacific Northwest as a kid, she said, living for a time in a tipi with her father and his girlfriend.

“I spent a lot of time growing up in the woods and it was magical being connected to the earth,” Irwin said over the phone from California. “Now, I have a child and I am looking around and sort of saddened by how little connection to the earth a lot of our kids have.”

It was when telling her son tall tales while he fell asleep that the concept for the show emerged, Irwin said.

“I wrote this little book and then I thought, ‘Oh, it would be fun to make one of these chapters into a short (film),’” Irwin said. “Then, I happened to be looking around for an artist to work with and was talking to my friends at Nickelodeon and just checking things out online.”

It was serendipity that led Irwin to Love, she said.

“My mom, who is a harpsichordist, was producing a harpsichord festival in the Palm Springs area and I went out to enjoy a weekend of entertainment,” Irwin said. “Lo and behold, Andrea’s mom, who is also a harpsichordist, was there performing that weekend and doing some master classes.”

Irwin learned that Love had just completed an animated stop-motion short that had been accepted for the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

“I looked at her website and just instantly knew that was the right thing for the material I had written,” Irwin said. “That is how it began. I reached out to her and she is … one of the most conscientious, creative, kind people I have had the great fortune to work with. I have just enjoyed every step of the way.”

A long process

For the five minute short, Love has had to shoot about 3,600 photos. That is 12 frames per second, she said.

“That is one industry standard,” she said. “The other is 24 FPS. Thankfully I do the look of not quite as smooth as the 24 FPS.”

On a good day of animating, Love said she can get anywhere between five and ten seconds of animation completed.

Each frame is only a tiny bit different than the preceding frame, she said.

With so many frames to keep track of, Love relies on stop-motion software.

“I can see all the pictures I have taken,” she said. “You see all the pictures in the timeline, then you can line up your audio under that if you have puppets.”

Professional voice acting

For the voice actors, Irwin recruited entertainment industry veterans.

“Before (Love) had done animation, I had gone up there,” Irwin said. “We had worked on puppets and creative concepts and then I left and came back down and recorded and edited the dialogue. I sent it back up there so she was able to work to that.”

Originally, Irwin cast all adults, even for the child characters. Later, colleagues convinced Irwin to recast kids in those roles.

“I auditioned a bunch of girls and ultimately cast two amazing girls — Camryn Jones who plays Mud, and Melany Ochoa who plays Leila, her best friend. Then I got the opportunity to work with the girls and my son (Oz) who plays “Puddin’”, the little boy.”

The child actors did an amazing job, Irwin said, especially since they had to contend with Automated Dialog Replacement. ADR is the process of re-recording dialogue after the filming process to improve audio quality or reflect dialogue changes.

“I was so impressed,” Irwin said. “ADR can be tough, even for adults. These two kids really nailed it.”

When it is complete in the near future, Irwin and Love will submit the short to various film festivals and industry executives, Irwin said.

“We are hoping to pitch it around town here in Los Angeles and beyond and see if it is a fit for the market at this particular point,” she said.”

Potential markets

Irwin is not sure if the new show will be picked up by a traditional TV studio or by an online streaming service.

“At this point I am not making that decision,” she said. “Whoever is the right buyer, who has like-minded ideas and is on board with what Andrea and I are thinking, those would be the people we would probably want to go with no matter what their platform was.”

If the show is picked up, Love will find much more work to do.

“I know that animating a TV show is a lot different than making a short film,” she said. “There would be some big changes afoot if that ever did occur.”

After so much work, Love said she is looking forward to sharing the short with the world.

“I am happily on the other side of a ton of work, and pretty soon here I will be releasing that work into the world in one form or another, so I feel really good.”