JOSHUA S. REED Esq.
I’m a writer, filmmaker, scribbler of pictures and doe-eyed lover of all things transgressive. I’m Australian, although I was born in Islington, London, within earshot of the Bow Bells, so technically I’m a cockney. I sprang from my mother’s loins a Pisces, but changed my star sign to Taurus because it’s tougher. I weigh 70ish kilos and am 177.5 cms tall. I used to be 178 cm but lost half a centimetre when I broke my back, crushing my T12 vertebra. I also had a kidney transplant when I was 22, and then another one a few years back, so I choose to believe I can’t be killed. No one’s proven me wrong yet.
But back to film. I love film. I love the way it looks and moves and tells stories, I love its innate profanity and elusive potential for the sublime. I love that film incorporates every other art form and treats them so shabbily.
And I operate by one simple conviction, that films are better when people die.
I've worked in film and TV pretty much forever, initially as an editor and then as an animator, director, producer, writer and whateveranyonewillpaymetodoer. I've made two feature films, PRIMAL and WE'RE NOT HERE TO FUCK SPIDERS, produced upwards of forty hours of TV, and worked as an animator and director with the Chaser on their shows from The Chaser's War on Everything onward. I've even dabbled in projection mapping, animating the great Reg Mombassa's work for VIVID 2024 (and keen to do more of that if you hear of anything).
DIRECTOR REEL
ANIMATION REEL
I'm still developing film and TV projects these days, but also putting the final touches on a novel, TEN THOUSAND DOORS and spending a good deal of time on my new upcycled tee shirt endeavor, SEWERSIDE. We'll get to all that, though. For now, scroll on for a potted history of my vagary-informed journey to this point:
EAR, NOSE and THROAT
Back in the day, my brother Sam Reed, Nige Christensen and I had a production company called Ear, Nose and Throat. While producing interstitials for an ABC Saturday morning show in the late 90’s called Recovery, we started tooling around with claymation, something Sam and I had done a bit of as smelly children.
SELF PORTRAIT WITH SPIDER INFUSED GOITER 2019
These little visiual doodles struck a bit of a chord, and claymation dominated the next four years for us. MTV was a favourite client because, basically, they just let us make shit and then put it to air. They gave us money too, which was a bonus.
SKYDIVER won them a garbagetruckful of awards around the world. Karma people, karma! THE APPOINTMENT was the longest ident we made for them, which ensured it got very little airplay. POO FACTORY was commissioned by an outgoing creative director. We were a bit surprised he OK'd it, but assumed it was a bit of a raised middle finger to the MTV behemoth. After we delivered it, the new creative director rang us to tell us how much she hated it. It won a Gold Promax. Karma, people! Karma!
Channel [V] was another favourite client, for much the same reason, and Karma rewarded them for their largesse with a lot of pointy doorstops also.
One year they rang to tell us one of our idents had won a Silver Award in Hong Kong the night before. We celebrated briefly, until it dawned on us that a silver award meant someone was better than us, and our elation quickly turned to outrage. SOMEONE WAS BETTER THAN US?!!! Then MTV rang to tell us our Skydiver Ident had won a Gold Award in Hong Kong the night before. Of course! We were better than us! The moral of this story is “unbridled hubris pays”.
SELF PORTRAIT
WITH BRAINSUCKER
2019
In the end 30 seconds can become a bit limiting, so we decided to have a crack at a TV series. We made a 30 minute pilot for a claymation comedy about vivisection called Larry Labrat. It was briefly in development at the ABC before the head of television was toppled by a new head of television, who wiped the slate clean. Larry Labrat the series was dead in the water, but we gave him another outing in Rattus Pistofficus, a short film we made for Tropfest, The World's Largest Short Film Festival™. Sam laboured for months animating this puppy which was a finalist in Tropfest 2005.
After that I started animating on The Chaser's War on Everything, then went on to produce 42 episodes of a music and yammering show at the ABC called triplej TV with the Doctor, where I had the privilege to work with the great Sam Simmons.
Somewhere in amongst all this I was acting in a short film by a friend, Rob Gibson, alongside another friend, John Cordukes. At about 4 in the morning, standing on the balcony of the location staring into the wilds of the Blue Mountains, John and I decided to bypass the usual film funding channels we’d been wasting our time with and make a horror movie off our own bats, whatever it took. 18 months later we were shooting PRIMAL.
After primal I continued working for the Chaser guys while developing more of my own projects in conjunction with Rob, often dwelling too long in various circles of development hell. Then we decided to make another feature, this time with virtually no money at all. That film's WE'RE NOT HERE TO FUCK SPIDERS.
VIVID 2025
This was one of those rare dream jobs that comes completely out of the blue. Driving down to Melbourne for Christmas in '23 I got a call from Jason French at Spinifex asking if I'd be interested in tackling a projection mapping animation for Sydney's 2024 Vivid festival. I'd been interested in projection mapping since I first saw it, so obviously I was keen, but the clincher was we'd be animating the work of the great Reg Mombassa. As I said, a dream job.
And Reg was a dream collaborator. Not a precious bone in his body, he left us to our devices interpreting his idea of a robot on a road trip through his surreal worlds. With 3500 artworks in our greedy little fists, Jason and I nutted out an absurd story and I spent the next three months gleefully animating joyous nonsense with the invaluable help of the supremely talented animators and technicians at Spinifex Group Sydney and the producer you always want at your back, David Hoare.
And anytime someone suggested maybe something we did was a little too weird, Reg was there to say no! Make it weirder!