100,000 views on Vimeo

'The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling' has had over 100,000 views since being released online in April.

Thank you to everyone who has watched and shared the film, I really appreciate your support. Ivor has come out of retirement to say thanks!

For the world to see

At the time of writing Afraid of Falling has been online for two days, has racked up 11,900 views, been awarded a prestigious Vimeo Staff Pick and featured on the Vimeo homepage.

The film has also been picked up and featured elsewhere online, here are a few of my favourites:

Fussed Magazine

Director's Notes

Animatie

Stop Motion Portugal

Forbidden Planet

Awesome Robo

Lakino

Coming soon

I will finally be releasing The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling online on Monday 15th April. The film will be up on my Vimeo page where you can find most of my other films.

After more than a year on the festival circuit the film has been screened at over thirty five festivals internationally including Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film, Anirmau and Encounters International Short Film Festival. The film has won four awards including 'Best Up and Coming Talent Award' at Canterbury Anifest and 2nd Prize Royal Television Society Student Animation Award.

It's been nominated for a further eleven awards including a BAFTA Cymru 'Short Form and Animation Award', the 'McLaren Award for New British Animation' at Edinburgh International Film Festival and was also shortlisted for the British Animation Awards.

BAFTA Cymru Nomination

I'm delighted to announce that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has been nominated for a Bafta Cyrmu Award in the category of Short Form and Animation. There are three nominations in the category for the British Academy Cymru Award; Funday by Keri Collins, Ryan Hooper and Stephen Hanks and Sweet Sixteen by Gavin Porter, David Davies-Llewellyn and Pip Broughton as well as Falling. It's a huge honour to be nominated and to be in competition with such quality work. A significant step for the film and a celebration of the talented team who made the film with me.

The awards ceremony will take place on 30th September at the Wales Millennium Centre, full details of the 2012 nominations here.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

Another still from the film to celebrate the news

From Scotland to Italy, my graduation film is still visiting festivals around the world. I'm very excited to say that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling will be screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I'm also very proud that it's been shortlisted for the Mclaren Award for New British Animation. I won't be able to make it up to the festival as I'm busy rehearsing The Life After in Bristol but if you happen to be in Edinburgh on Tuesday 28th June Afraid of Falling is screening in McLaren Animation 3 in Cameo 1 at 17.00.

The film will also screen at Scratch International Animation Festival in Lecce, Italy.

RTS Prize

Thursday and Friday I was back in Newport as The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling returned to Wales to screen at Ffresh Student Moving Image Festival. The film was nominated for two awards: Best Animation (which We Weren't The First Ones Here won last year) and a new category Best UK Graduate Animation. I didn't win either but did win 2nd Prize Royal Television Society Student Animation Award which was nice. The RTS Wales centre described the film as having "sophisticated imagery and music".

Ffresh festival goes from strength to strength; this year had an impressive programme with guests such as Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies), Asif Kapadia (Senna) and Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation). My festival highlights included a panel discussing the differences between festival circuit and internet release with Liz Harkman from Encounters and Matt Lambert, editor-at-large for Motionographer, as well as an informative talk by Merlin Crossingham from Aardman who is Creative Director of Wallace and Gromit.

Watersprite Nominations

I'm excited to announce that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has been nominated for two awards at Watersprite International Student Film Festival in Cambridge, UK. The film was shortlisted a few weeks back for 'Best Animation' and 'Best Original Soundtrack' for the film's fantastic score by Kit Wilson. The film made it through the second round of judging by industry professionals in London and is now in the final nominations for the two categories. This is really exciting for several reasons, one being that this is the first nomination for the film's music. James Nee, director of Ffresh Festival in Wales described the score as 'great' and 'perfectly suited to the story and style of animation'.

Kit and I have been friends since we were very small and used to make films together on a black and white video camera in our parents living rooms. In the last few years as each of us has developed our work we have worked on four projects together including animation and theatre. For Afraid of Falling I wanted the music to feel like a silent film score, and we worked together on the way the music could tell the story with the visuals, reflect the emotions of the character and punctuate moments in the animation. Here's a bit about Kit's practice;

Kit Wilson is a composer based in London, currently studying for an MMus at TrinityLaban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The majority of his work is studio-based, with a particular emphasis on synthesising disparate styles around complex grooves. His music draws heavily on the rhythmic ideas of contemporary jazz and metal, and explored how to introduce these ideas into a number of contrasting genres.

You can hear some more of Kit's music on his Soundcloud and you can watch the other films Kit and I have collaborated on here: Curiouser and Curiouser (2007), The Scientist and the Omnipotence of Dream (2008). Since the beginning of 2012, The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has been selected for six more festivals and has been shortlisted for eight awards, a huge reward after all the hard work and I'm thrilled that the film will be seen by more audiences around the world.

New Year

 

 I'm pleased to announce that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has been selected to screen at One Voice festival in Bournemouth and Animated Exeter in february and also Athens Animfest in March (details on the screenings page). I went to Animated Exeter back in 2008 with composer Kit Wilson after finishing Curiouser and Curiouser. That year the festival had a brilliant exhibition by the Brothers Quay entitled Dormitorium. The Quay's work has always been an inspiration to me and I have written about their work in several essays over the last few years. Here's a picture of a tailer puppet from Street of Crocodiles (1986) in one of the intricate sets.

Tailor puppet from Street of Crocodiles (Atelier Koninck, 1986)

This year the festival programme looks equally exciting and I'm particularly looking forward to seeing the talk 'Crossing the Celluloid Divide' by multi media theatre company Forkbeard Fantasy. I recently saw a brilliant exhibition of their work at the Southbank Centre in London, a rare chance to see the 37 year history of such a vibrant and experimental theatre company. On display were puppets, drawings and designs, interactive sculptures, costumes, videos of performances and photographs.

Theatre of Animation Exhibition, Southbank Centre 2011-12, Img: BBC

Animfest will mark the films first screening in Greece, I'm happy it's reaching all these different places. The last time I was in Athens I woke up on the roof of a building... I'd love to visit again.

From BAF to BBC

The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling seemed to go down well at Bradford Animation Festival last month. Unfortunately I couldn't get up north to attend but thought I'd post these two mentions the film recieved. The first is on the National Media Museum's blog by Zara Hussain who thought the film was 'incredibly humorous'. Read the piece here. The second was on a blog by animation student Cassandra Adsett who described the film as 'lovely'. Read the piece here.

I'm also delighted to announce that Afraid of Falling has been selected to show across the UK on the BBC Big Screens scheme. The screens are used to showcase all kinds of entertainment from live broadcasts of operas to sport to short films and the screens appear in around twenty cities around the UK including Portsmouth, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmigham.

Geraldine McCullagh, Editor, Screens' Operational Centre said,

"We’re always on the lookout for material of sufficient interest and quality to appear on all our screens. This time it’s a selection of animations from Newport Film School that were particularly beautiful and engaging, and it’s not the first time we have taken their submissions to the Screen Manager in Wales to go UK wide."

This is what I said (for the film school press release),

BBC Big Screens is an exciting opportunity for my film to reach thousands of people in a unique way; I love the idea that people could stumble across the animations whilst in a city centre. Screening at film festivals is great but this gives the film a platform to reach a wider audience which is important to me. It's a real privilege to have been selected and a significant break for the film.

November Screenings

If I have any fans in Estonia, or if you happen to be passing by Talin, you can see Afraid of Falling at Animated Dreams Festival this week. For details on when the film is screening click here. They also included a clip of the film in their trailer for the Best International Student Animation category which was nice.

For a chance to see it in the UK, the film is at Encounters International Film Festival this week in Bristol. See my blog post about Encounters here for more information. The film will be screening at the Arnolfini on Wednesday 16th at 18.00 and Friday 18th at 12.00. Click here for screening details on the Encounters website.

You can now also find me on Twitter where you can find some more regular updates about the film. You can find me: twitter.com/#!/josephwallaceuk

BAA Shortlist

I'm thrilled to announce that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has been shortlisted for the prestigious British Animation Awards 2012. Founded by Jayne Pilling in 1996, the awards have been running for fifteen years and showcase the work of the best talent in the country, new and old. Here's what the copy on the website says about the awards.

We’re back - and busy preparing for the next British Animation Awards, which will take place March 15, 2012, at the BFI on the Southbank. The British Animation Awards is a totally unique event: the only one that brings together all the key players, and emerging and established talent, from the many and varied sectors of the UK animation scene, for an evening that is very different – and we think rather more fun! – than most Awards events.

There is another stage of selection before the final award nomination but I'm really pleased simply to be shortlisted. You can read an article about the awards (albiet a fairly old one from 2004) on the BBC here.

Life of the film

The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling has screened, and is screening, at various festivals internationally. See the screenings page for more details. The film also won the Best Up and Coming Animation Talent award at Canterbury Anifest which was a real honour and a great festival. We'll be at Bradford Animation Festival and Encounters International Film Festival in November.

Success at Canterbury Anifest

I spent the weekend at Canterbury Anifest, a delightful festival and am excited to say that The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling won the Up Coming Animation Talent award 2011. This was a lovely unexpected surprise. You can see the award below. And my bewildered face.

Ivor, the film's protagonist, enjoys his second award

Up Coming Animation Talent Award. The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling

Dir. Joseph Wallace. Canterbury Anifest 2011

Industry event

As part of our graduation show at Newport we had an industry event comprising of talks, an exhibition tour, a screening of the best 2011 films and a drinks reception. A fair few local industry folk turned up and it was a really nice way to round off the year.

 

Drinks reception in the new city campus at Newport

We had an award ceremony as part of the events and The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling won the 'Best Film' award which was really great. The awards given out were framed drawings made by my good friend Luiz Stockler who graduated last year with his brilliant film Vovô. You can see more of his work on his blog here.

The award-winners with their awards

From left to right: Alex Hancocks and Luke George (John and Betty best sound), Stephen Craner (David best technical achievement), Eva Wagner (Sun and Moon best Animation), Tharun Joseph (Blocked best art design), Luiz Stockler (Newport alumnus and creator of the awards), Caroline Parsons (course leader), Helen Dallat and Daisy Gould (Bare best story), Joseph Wallace and Emma-Rose Dade (The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling best Film). Photo: Media Academy Wales

A close-up of our lovely award

Afraid of Falling composer Kit Wilson came over for the event which was nice as it meant various members of the crew who's worked remotely on the same project got to meet and watch the film together. At the same time Newport was also hosting a module of a new multi-platform training course called the Transform@Lab which is supported by MEDIA who also fund Animation Sans Frontières, the European professional training programme I attended part in last year. Transform@Lab is also run with two of the same schools from ASF; Gobelins and MOME, so József Fülöp, head of Animation at MOME, who I know through ASF came to watch the film with other members of international staff.

Sigh of relief: Sinead Oram, Emma-Rose Dade and Kit Wilson share a joke

Out for an Indian: Transform@Lab participants, tutors and guests

James Nee, Ffresh Festival director came to the show and did a great write-up of the 2011 films which can be seen here.

Wrapping up

Well, I'm relieved to report that the film is finally finished and was handed-in on time for our university deadline. The final week of production was one blur of last-minute animating, editing, special effects, sound recording, compositing, sound mixing, late nights, pizza, music recording, rendering [...] and exporting but we got there in the end.

Emma-Rose recording sound for the film

Whilst I was finishing the last of the animation for the film, Emma-Rose continued working on the sound. Much of the sound was gathered from audio libraries earlier in the project for use in the animatic but I also recorded various low-fi temp sounds from scratch. Emma-Rose set about recording high-quality clips of various noises for use through out the film. Sounds included; scrapes, slips, bangs, smashes, footsteps, soil and other strange noises.

Jack Vaughan immersed in the art of mixing

After animating I went to Bristol to mix the sound with Jack Vaughan. This process was fairly unconventional as I was still editing the latter half of the film whilst Jack mixed the sound for the first half. One thing I am really pleased with in this film is having been able to raise the bar in terms of production values in many aspects of the project. Being able to spend time with Jack on getting the soundscapes right, making them work with the image and help to tell the story was just really excellent.

The sound montage of clips and samples placed alongside

the image which is shown as thumbnails along the top

When I planned the project I had all the elements in mind; image, music, sound, all the various visual languages etc. It's easy to forget later in the production that everything has been carefully constructed around a balance of these elements and they all rely on each other. I think at one point I became disillusioned with the image alone and I did worry about clarity and value in the image and I think it was only after getting everything together finally that things made sense again and those elements synthesized in a way I'd hoped they would.

The tired director's weary gaze and beside him, a glimpse of the film

Lewys Hobden did a couple of great composited sequences for us. I'd intended for the parts where Ivor moves from one location to the next to be animated in stop-motion like the rest of the film but when we'd made the set, which was huge in itself, the removal van I was trying to make out of cardboard had to be about 4mm wide which was fairly impossible to make with the detail required. So I shot the van from another scene against a green screen and then shot the landscape separately and Lewys animated these sequences in computer and they work really well. Audiences who've seen the film since don't seem to notice the jump in technique and I'm happy to let technology help us out where possible. So the film has ended up having stop-motion, 2D and computer animation. Phew.

A very tired Kit Wilson putting the finishing touches to the music (sorry Kit!)

Emma-Rose and I popped up to London very briefly to see Jan Švankmajer talk in person at the Barbican (write-up on my blog here) and get the final music from Kit Wilson. It was a very late night night but great hearing it all together. Kit had done the final recording session that day; him on piano accompanied by Victoria Bernath on viola. The final piece of the puzzle was in place.

There were several times on this project where I never thought we would get it finished. The sheer scale of it was daunting, all that needed to be constructed and animated, but we've got there and with the help of a brilliant and dedicated team. I have added a thanks section to the crew page detailing all the lovely people I am indebted to.

To be continued

As our deadline looms ever closer, I have very little time to write about the intricacies of production. I can however report that the mixing of media is working well, green screen has performed a treat, Lewys Hobden is a very helpful man, Gemma Roberts has jumped in to animate Ivor in 2D and I need to sleep more. That is all for now.

A message from our sponsor

Animation Newport 2011

Check out the Animation Newport 2011 blog for an overview of our whole year. The blog contains profiles and info on each students as well as some interesting videos about the films and the course (one with a sneaky peek of Ivor on the move). We are having an animation industry day on 23rd June which will include a panel discussion, film screening, awards ceremony, tour of the new campus and drinks reception.

The general exhibition and graduation shows will be held from June 17th to July 1st. More information on the grad shows can be found here - also, the animation shows are represented by a bit of artwork from The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling.

The animation students at Newport talk about their graduation films.

...from a dark room

I am writing from my home for the present few weeks; it is small-ish room painted black with hot, bright lights and is full of small buildings, interiors, props and large painted backdrops. The way the production process works allows the model making to be staggered with the shoot as there is so much to physically make. I thought it was interesting to hear, in a video I watched recently about the making of Coraline, writer Neil Gaiman musing on the fact that everything in a stop-motion film is made from scratch. I suppose I'm so embroiled in this world and the process of three dimensional animation that it's not something I even think about anymore, I just take it for granted.

A look at the villa kitchen in progress

Kate Middleton admires our freshly undercoated shutters drying in the sun

This is especially so for our film as, although it may be short, it features several locations and all of these sets have to be made quickly in a very short timescale. In the film Ivor moves from one place to another as his paranoia gets a hold of him and I wanted to place the audience geographically by having establishing shots introducing each location and Ivor's new abode. These establishing shots luckily do not feature Ivor so they were able to be made on a miniature scale, following the same construction techniques as all the other sets.

One of the establishing shots from the storyboard

Emma-Rose working on a chair for Ivor

Emma-Rose is in the workshop finishing the final set for the films climax, I won't give too much away but it involves a lot of tiny paper flowers. I have moved into the studio on campus; a dark secluded room where daylight seldom streams through the blacked-out windows. The models for the film are piled up around the edges and I have the stage in the centre of the room. Here's a look at the set-up.

Me on set (generally looking worried about something)

Following with the film's overall aesthetic of paper and cardboard, parts of the puppet are made from paper. He has paper eyes that can be replaced to make him blink, similar to the old technique used on programmes such as Ivor Wood's Postman Pat. Actually much of the methodologies we are engaging with are old techniques that I'm trying to synthesize with digital technologies to tell the story in an engaging and entertaining way. The only problem with tiny black eyes is that sometimes, when you're trying to pick them off the puppets face with the end of a surgical scalpel, they fall onto the large black floor... and you never see them again. The moustaches are a little easier to keep an eye on at 11mm. I was thinking I could scale these up and start a business for men with upper-lip hair loss.

Replacement moustaches

Kit Wilson is playing around with musical developments for the score as we shoot. It's a fairly industrious period at the moment, everything seems to be happening at once. We're modelmaking, lighting, shooting, editing and beginning some post-production simultaneously to maximise our time. We're shooting the film in full high definition which brings challenges of it's own. I'm also shooting at 24 frames per second as opposed to 12 which I'm used to. I wanted to really push the production values of this film for a more polished finish. From the design and colour, to the lighting, the movement and animation, even the rig removal and special effects far surpass anything I have done before.

Flowers and flower pots ready for action

We're shooting using Jamie Caliri's Dragon Stop Motion Animation software which has been a dream. It is a deceptively simple program with all the features you might need. I always think of the process of shooting stop-motion animation as a kind of alchemy; there are so many elements to balance and think about and 'Dragon' is a very stable, instinctive programme that helps you manage everything on set.

Me setting up a shot

We took a few days out from the film last week to finish off our dissertations which were handed-in on Thursday. My title was The Performativity of Dolls: Puppets in Animation and Theatre. In between intense bursts of writing, Emma-Rose and I took time to visit a wetlands wildlife sanctuary to have a think. Strangely, it was next to a power station.

Me standing in the wetlands centre having a think

I then popped over to Bristol for a meeting with Fairground Theatre about a project this summer and came back to Newport where we held a cake sale to raise money for our graduation show. There were some pretty impressive cakes and a great effort from the animation class. This is what it looks like when artists make cakes!

There were so many cakes people had a lot of trouble choosing

Now we're cracking on with model making and props. The two biggest and most complex sets are almost done and there's mainly the miniature establishing shots left to work on. Oh, and Ivor still needs his head. We start shooting around Easter so more photos of all the elements under camera to follow.

Emma-Rose working on the villa kitchen

The taking of shape

As we edge closer to the shoot, the physical world of the film takes shape. Fields of paper flowers, cardboard hallways and painted skies. Our dissertations are in next week so time has to be assigned for finishing touches and preparation for the hand-in. In the mean time, here are some photos of the film's developments.

Colour schemes for the city sequence

Model maker Sinead Oram making floorboards and

Emma-Rose Dade drilling a hole for the hallway set

The hallway set and a smaller scale building halfway through construction