Ian is passionate about integrating design into the conception of a project from the earliest stages of pre-production. His experience supporting projects from their inception enables him to develop creative solutions to design challenges which maximise the production value achieved within a film's budget, whether that be for micro-budget Indies or studio features.
​
"​Ian's creativity, vision and ability to deliver highly ambitious concepts within tight budgets make him a uniquely valuable collaborator for productions of all levels."
- Craig Conway, director, Little Red.
​
At the core of Ian's work is his creative ingenuity. From his earliest work, Ian has always had the drive and imagination to achieve highly ambitious projects. At Beamish Museum, he single-handedly designed, wrote and directed their 'Halloween Week' for 6 consecutive years. Each year, Ian created three separate, concurrent immersive events, involving 60 actors and attended by over 2,500 people per night. In 2016, the immersive experiences included: 'The Witches of Birch Wood', a folk-horror woodland maze exploring witch-hunts and revenge in plague-era England; 'The Grey Lady', a gothic Georgian ghost-story following a young woman, murdered by her father for falling in love with the wrong man; and 'Scarecrows', a Stephen King-esque 1950s monster-horror of two boys making the fatal mistake of believing the incantations found in a spell book are fantasy. The entire event was achieved on a budget of £1,000.
​
Since he started designing films, some career highlights include: creating multiple, practical flooding-sets across three sound stages for 'Ocean Deep'; designing and building walls which ran blood for 'I'll Play Mother'; replicating a full, working marine biology lab; utilising forced perspective to build a false floor on location for 'Hush Now', which enabled the actor to hide beneath fake floorboards while other actors walked above her and included traps for a seamless in-camera transition between the two; designing an American farmhouse in rural Yorkshire which incorporated pyrotechnic and breakaway aspects into the build to enable practical SFX alongside building a 1:25 scale model for the final explosion of 'Stand Your Ground'.
​
Ian loves the diversity of working across different genres, although he has a particular soft-spot for horror. His dream is to work with Blumhouse.​


Awards



AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL 2023
Supervising Art Director for feature film THE TRAP
​
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2023
Buyer for feature film BONUS TRACK
​
CANNES WORLD FILM FESTIVAL 2023
UK Production Designer for short film THE TAKE