Ian Scoones was a leading British special effects designer who began his career working for Hammer horror films in the early 1960s. He was also frequently involved with the long-running Doctor Who series, and supervised the effects for the first season of the sci-fi series Blakes 7 in 1978.
Scoones was born in London on 1940, and studied painting, photography and set design at the Medway College of Art. He began working in films in the early 1960s, joining Les Bowie’s effects team at Hammer. He was an assistant effects artist on such films as Scream of Fear (1961), Shadow of the Cat (1961), Night Creatures (aka Captain Clegg) (1962), These Are the Damned (aka The Damned) (1963), Kiss of the Vampire (1963), She (1965), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Mummy’s Shroud (1967), and Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit) (1967).
He began working in television with the BBC later in the decade, where he created a model effects unit for their special effects department. He supplied effects for numerous Doctor Who episodes including Curse of Peladon, Frontier in Space, Planet of the Spiders, Pyramids of Mars and The Invisible Enemy, and City of Death. He also worked on the television series Doomwatch, Blakes 7, and Max Headroom.
Scoones also designed effects for many of the episodes of the horror anthology series Hammer House of Horror in 1980 including Witching Time, The House That Bled to Death, The Silent Scream, Children of the Full Moon, Guardian of the Abyss, Visitor from the Grave, The Two Faces of Evil, and The Mark of Satan. He also worked on the subsequent series Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense in 1984.
Scoones provided effects for several more films including Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Haunted Honeymoon (1986), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1993), before retiring to Spain in the early 1990s. He continued to sell his art and appeared at several British film and television conventions.
Scoones died of liver cancer in Spain on January 20, 2010, at the age of 69.
Only just found out this sad news. Worked for him in 1984 and Max Headroom. A great fund of stories and a super nice man