Joseph Wallace is an animation and puppetry director whose short films have received international acclaim and screened at numerous festivals around the world. He has written and directed more than a dozen shorts since 2007, including puppet, object and cut-out animation as well as live-action, dance and documentary.

Joseph is currently working on a new animated short, produced by Delaval Film, which received a development residency at the Open Workshop in Denmark and won the 2017 Visegrad Animation Forum pitching prize. His latest music video for the American band Sparks trended on both Youtube and Vimeo, was featured on countless websites and blogs, being described as ”sublime” by French site Allociné, and was nominated for a Kinsale Shark Award and long listed for the 1.4 Awards. Extracts were also played on BBC’s Newsnight and the One Show and the video featured on the Guardian online. In 2016 he worked with Hungarian animator Péter Vácz to create Dear John, an animated music video for the band James, which won Best Animation at both Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and the Kinsale Shark Awards. It received a Vimeo Staff Pick and was featured on websites including Booooooom, Director’s Notes and Motionographer.

Joseph’s 2014 live action puppet film La Forét Sauvage screened at Jim Henson’s Puppets on Film Festival in New York, IPUFF in Canada and was selected for the DepicT 90 second film competition at Encounters Festival, his second film to be shortlisted after Showdown at Yohoko Valley in 2007. Natural Disaster, also made in 2014, screened at Budapest, Kraków, Athens and Barcelona film festivals and was nominated for the animation award at London Short Film Festival. His graduation film The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling travelled to over forty festivals worldwide, won Best Up-and-Coming Talent Award at Canterbury Anifest and was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru. It has since had over 150k views on Vimeo and was awarded a Staff Pick.

Joseph has also written and directed for theatre and created animated projections for stage. He directed and co-designed Green Ginger’s Outpost (2014), a co-production between Tobacco Factory Theatres and Figur Teatret, Norway, and worked as Puppetry Associate on Handspring Puppet Company and Tom Morris’s A Midsummer Nights Dream (2013). He has made projections for shows in the UK and USA, and has worked as a puppetry consultant and dramaturg for theatre and opera. In 2015 he was made a BBC Performing Arts Fellow and named one of 32 ‘Ones to Watch’.

Joseph has a first class honours degree in animation and was the first British participant on the European training programme, Animation Sans Frontières, held at four of Europe’s most prestigious animation schools. This led him to co-found Caravel Collective, a group of mixed media filmmakers based in the South of France. Joseph is active as a curator, writer and lecturer having spoken at festivals and universities including; Bedfordshire, South Wales, Surrey, Central School of Speech and Drama, LAMDA, Animac, Spoleto and Festival National du Film d’Animation. He has written for animation magazines Imagine and Skwigly as well as essays on animation aesthetics and history. Joseph curated the film programme of the 2015 Bristol Festival of Puppetry which included guests the Quay Brothers and Barry Purves, as well as the first ever retrospective of children’s animator Ivor Wood.

1. Hiring non-UK animators in UK’s post-Brexit immigration system

   ScreenSkills · Mar 2021

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