Sophie Neil

Art Department

Sophie has a rich and varied career across a spectrum of Production Design disciplines; both within live and recorded mediums, for stage and screen.  She has worked on many feature-films and TV productions; Live Award ceremonies and Music events; site-specific collaborative projects; Theatre, Opera and Dance productions.

Sophie is originally from Fife in Scotland. Her undergraduate degree was in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before undertaking a Masters in Scenography at The Central School of Speech and Drama, graduating with a distinction.

Sophie subsequently worked as a freelance designer, focusing mainly on Opera and Dance at venues including Glyndebourne and The South Bank Centre. In order to increase her career flexibility, Sophie decided to improve her technical skills, accepting a scholarship from the Dewar Arts Award to support her in a training programme at the National Film and Television School. This Master of Arts Degree in Production Design for Screen was accredited by the Royal College of Art.

In addition to the prestigious Dewar Award, Sophie has also been the grateful recipient of the Maxton Bequest, as well as awards from The Cross Trust and the Royal Scottish Corporation, which she has gained over the years, in support of her production design work. Recently, companies such as Warner Brothers, Disney, Sky Atlantic and Universal have employed Sophie in the Art Departments of large-scale productions.

Sophie has honed her skills in Design and Art Department work and is seasoned in technical draughting (both by hand and using Vectorworks 2D & 3D), scale model-making, conceptual visualization (by hand and using Photoshop) and overseeing set construction builds, scheduling and budgeting.  As well as valuing a tight rapport with the creative team, she enjoys working closely with other specialist departments such as carpenters, sculptors, metalwork, special effects, plasterers, painters, to name but a few, in order to achieve the optimum performance / shooting space.

Sophie thoroughly enjoys creative collaboration and is motivated to find innovative ways for design briefs to be fulfilled.