David Bryan

Jesse V Johnson racked up in Ipswich,Suffolk with a full on shoot’em up script starring Thomas Jane,Dominique Tipper and John Malkovitch. Shot on a disused RAF base near Woodbridge, we built and dressed many individual sets and co-ordinated with SFX team to deliver a slick action movie,great fun and a great art department!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD4UrHqPp9U

Production Designer

Four teenage girls diving in a ruined underwater city quickly learn they've entered the territory of the deadliest shark species in the claustrophobic labyrinth of submerged caves.

47 Meters Down Uncaged presented one of the most challenging Production Design briefs requiring a 38 sections of a submerged underwater Mayan Temple and tunnels to be filmed in 2 separate studios alternating each day to allow the sets to be turned around.There was no opportunity of draining and refilling the tanks due to the time to fill and reheat and the shooting schedule was tight due to the restricted hours cast and crew could be in the water so each section was constructed on dry land,waterproofed and designed to be able to crane each piece into position using divers to assemble. 4 different companies were employed to construct the various sets and co-ordinated to deliver and remove each section once it had been filmed. Various stunt and SFX requirements were designed and built in to the required sections, tested again on dry land and rigged ready for immersion and shooting.

Production Designer

Short film directed by Serkan Nihat, starring Charlotte Riley and Tom Weston-Jones,on the festival circuit this year.

Production Designer

47 Meters Down starring Mandy Moore and Claire Holt.

I had to design the shark cage and the dive boat and crane to all be fully practical but with the relevant safety elements incorporated. Working together with Outpost who created the sharks .Once we had the underwater shoot in the can ,flew out to oversee the location dresses and construction .Filmed in glamorous Basildon then out to the Dominican Republic for the open sea elements.On release it became the highest grossing Independant feature film in america cinema’s taking over 60 million dollars

Production Designer

Contemporary Thriller set in Mumbai,a Ghost story about a young family deciding to settle in India with their children.All is well until a tragic car accident leaves the mother to have to choose which of her two children she can save. Shot on location in Mumbai and then surrounding areas where we built a massive ruined temple for exterior approach shots then into Film City with a massive set build for the house incorporating practical electricals,plumbing,drainage and huge Monsoon rain effects. The intricate design came from a large scale model built to work out as many camera set ups and eyelines as possible,shot mostly on a technocrane mounted on a track the set allowed 360 degree shooting. Shot by Maxine Alexandra and directed by Johannes Roberts

“In the midst of a movie where almost every detail could be better, production designer David Bryan pulls off the minor miracle of an ideal horror-movie abode, complete with an open courtyard at the center and an attic bedroom perfectly suited for ritualistic sacrifice.”

VARIETY MAGAZINE

With its measured pacing, focus on family and repurposing of familiar horror conventions, the film represents a rather adult offering that can’t manage any memorable frights until well into the first hour of running time. Roberts fares somewhat better establishing a moody visual style, well-supported by Maxime Alexandre’s atmospheric cinematography and David Bryan’s imaginative production design, as well as some characteristic Mumbai locations, particularly a vintage wood-frame house that serves as the VFX-enhanced center of the principal action.

Hollywood Reporter

Senior Art Director

Working with a great art department in Madrid,Murcia and Capo de Gata.Turning a quiet seaside town into a Guatamalen fishing Village, Then Converting 7kms of abandoned motorway into Mexico for the opening chase scenes. Production Design by Sonja Claus

Production Designer

Elena and Ernesto are a successful professional couple living in London who are bitterly torn apart by the death of their only child. Three years later they have both somehow managed to start a new life. Until destiny forces them to reconnect and understand, they never really stopped loving one another.

Production Designer

"Starfish" tells the story of a couple whose love is tested to its limit after their perfect life falls apart in a single moment.

Production Designer

Based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 'Trishna' tells the story of one woman whose life is destroyed by a combination of love and circumstances. ... After an accident destroys her father's Jeep, Trishna goes to work for Jay, and they fall in love.

Filmed in Rajastan and Mumbai , directed by Michael WinterbottomStarring Frieda Pinto and Riz Ahmed

Production Designer

This ambitious documentary/drama/animation hybrid stars Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the devastated world of the future, asking the question: "Why didn't we stop climate change when we still had the chance?" He looks back on footage of real people around the world in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.

Production Designer

A street smart runner develops an intense rivalry with an equally ambitious wealthy young athlete.

Fast Girls Directed by Regan Hall required me to recreate a version of the 2011 Olympics,shot on location in London the stadium required a complete dress of Crystal Palace sports ground,Club bar redressed as a nightclub and indoor sprint track refurbished.

Production Designer

In November 2005, US Marines fell into an ambush by Iraqi insurgents and one officer got killed. The reprisals by the Americans were frightening, resulting in the massacre of 24 people, many of whom women and children. "Battle for Haditha" is the faithful account of this tragic event which scandalized the world.

Shot in Jordan using real ex marines as our cast,we set up 5 different families in and around Jerash and filmed each one randomly to keep the tension and to capture “Real” life. Directed By Nick Broomfield,this was the follow up to “Ghosts” The Morecambe Bay Chinese Cockle Pickers story.

Production Designer

A young girl, Ai Qin, pays $25,000 to be smuggled into the UK in order to support her family back in China. She is forced to live with eleven other Chinese in a small house in Thetford, Norfolk, working in factories and fields preparing food. The film was inspired by the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, when a gang of Chinese cockle-pickers found themselves trapped tide coming in.

Production Designer

Polar Bear pursues an act of violence as it ricochets through time. From Aaron as a young boy first encountering the bear, to ten years on, where his own rage finally explodes. Then over four more years on, a now young adult Aaron encounters Lea, both bound to and haunted by the same ghost of violence. Starring Jack Rowan and Hayley Squires.

UK Art Director

A boy seeks the help of a tree monster to cope with his single mother's terminal illness.

Uk art Director for the Spanish film A Monster Calls,shot in Manchester and the surrounding areas.The challenge was to build a yew tree that could be placed on an artificial graveyard build over an existing listed graveyard of national importance. Co-ordinating a large team of skilled Greensmen,Sculptors,Scenic Artists,Riggers and location Managers who then in turn had to work with the Spanish shooting crew. In sometimes atrocious weather and at one point after a massive overnight storm we found 40,000 volts running through the set due to a falled overhead transformer,it was challenging!

The art shop in the photos was a big transformation from a former charity shop,sadly it did not make it to the film.

Supervising Art Director

Jack is a children's author turned crime novelist whose detailed research into the lives of Victorian serial killers has turned him into a paranoid wreck, persecuted by the irrational fear of being murdered. When Jack is thrown a life-line by his long-suffering agent and a mysterious Hollywood executive takes a sudden and inexplicable interest in his script, what should be his big break rapidly turns into his big breakdown, as Jack is forced to confront his worst demons; among them his love life, his laundry and the origin of all fear.

An intense portrayal of elite soldiers who have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: disarming bombs in the heat of combat. When a new sergeant, James, takes over a highly trained bomb disposal team amidst violent conflict, he surprises his two subordinates, Sanborn and Eldridge, by recklessly plunging them into a deadly game of urban combat, behaving as if he's indifferent to death. As the men struggle to control their wild new leader, the city explodes into chaos, and James' true character reveals itself in a way that will change each man forever.

Filmed in Jordan,directed by Katherine Bigalow and shot byu Barry Ackroyd this went on to win 6 academy awards and 6 Baftas

A futuristic Brief Encounter (1945), this is a love story in which the romance is doomed by genetic incompatibility.

Director: Michael Winterbottom

On January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is to fly from Karachi to Dubai with his pregnant wife, Mariane, also a reporter. On the day before, with great care, he has arranged an interview in a café with an Islamic fundamentalist cleric. When Danny doesn't return, Mariane initiates a search. Pakistani police, American embassy personnel, and the FBI examine witnesses, phone records, e-mails, and hard drives. Who has him? Where is he? There's also the why: because of U.S. abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, because of a history of Journal cooperation with the CIA, because Pearl is a Jew? Through it all, Mariane is clearheaded, direct, and determined.

Filmed in Pakistan and India on locations dressed to match the real locations.

One of the big challenges was to create a working version of the 2004 internet so our cast could interact during the scenes.Over 10,000 pages of factually correct data were fed into a closed loop internet.

Manchester 1976: Cambridge educated Tony Wilson, Granada TV presenter, is at a Sex Pistols gig. Totally inspired by this pivotal moment in music history, he and his friends set up a record label, Factory Records, signing first Joy Division (who go on to become New Order) then James and the Happy Mondays, who all become seminal artists of their time. What ensues is a tale of music, sex, drugs, larger-than-life characters, and the birth of one of the most famous dance clubs in the world, The Hacienda - a mecca for clubbers as famous as the likes of Studio 54. Graphically depicting the music and dance heritage of Manchester from the late 70's to the early 90's, this comedy documents the vibrancy that made Mad-chester the place in the world that you would most like to be.

We recreated the iconic Hacienda in a biscuit factory in Ancoats,Once the locals realised that we were making a film that respected the whole manchester scene it became really fun with so much help and support from the locals and bands,shot by Robbie Muller on dv cam, the results speak for themselves,great film ,great cast, great crew……..

In February 2002 in the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, there are 53,000 refugees living in sub-human conditions since 1979 with the Soviet Union invasion and 2001 with the USA bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. The family of the Afghan Enayat and his cousin Jamal decides to send them illegally to London to have a better life. They hire coyotes to smuggle the cousins through Iran and Turkey to Italy and finally London hidden inside trucks and containers. However, the long journey locked in a container with other families poses a terrible challenge to the boys.

Shot over a period of months on the road,I had to recreate the Sangatte refugee camp in the uk as we were not welcome at the real one.I then covertly filmed the journey of the truck through the french customs and onto the Eurostar.

Boyo lives with his brother Sid, his sister Gwenny and their elderly mother Marlene in an economically depressed area of South-West Wales. Their father has vanished when they were small children, apparently headed for America. The leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding Sid has grown up obsessed with American culture and dreams of joining his father in the States. When the brothers discover that an open-cast mine is opening nearby they join the scramble for jobs, but their mother is unaccountably against the idea. On the morning when they need to report for work, they find she has sabotaged Sid's bike, scuppering their chances of employment. Sid and Gwenny begin to spend more and more of their considerable spare time together, washing down medication they've obtained under their mother's name with pilfered booze. Marlene's increasingly eccentric behaviour leads to her being interred in a hospital, but Boyo is powerless to stop his brother and sister from drifting dangerously out of touch with reality.

The House was a set build by an open cast mine but after the worst storms for 300 years it sank into the mud.After a salvage operation it was transported 72 miles west and rebuilt in a tiny village in the valleys,The cars were all purchased and resprayed in our workshop on site.The Harley Davidson was bought in London and ridden down to Llantrisant in a blizzard…….. Directed by Marc Evans and filmed by Pierre Aim and George Dianne,its a film I am immensely proud of.

Supervising Art director

Rosie and Vincent know each other for ten years, and are married for five. She doesn't like her job, he isn't too pleased working with her dad. They're trying to have a baby. One morning Benoit, a Frenchman and former pen pal of Rosie, whom she never met, comes to visit. Did Rosie love him? Does she love him now?