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About Us

Ambitious, innovative and continually evolving, Icon Films is an award-winning production company. From Animal Planet US’ highest-ever rating series, River Monsters, to Emmy-nominated actor (Charles Dance) narrated Savage Kingdom, for National Geographic, we deliver high-end factual content for the UK and international market. Working with wild animals, household names, and acknowledged experts in a diverse range of fields, we bring accessibility, revelation and storytelling to the screen. In the past five years we have filmed in over 52 countries and champion bringing logistically challenging productions to the screen with our distinctive brand.

With our office in Bristol, Icon Films is a continually growing independent production company, repeatedly listed in Broadcast’s Best Places to Work in TV, Televisual’s Top 100, Realscreen’s Global 100, the 4th Annual Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100 (2018) and most recently nominated Edinburgh TV Festival’s New Voice Awards as Best Company for New Talent. As an Albert Affiliated Production Partner, sustainability is at our core, with recent productions, such as Hippos: Africa’s River Giants, Jeremy Wade’s Dark Waters and Okavango – A Flood of Life earning three-star albert certifications.

Wellbeing

There will always be tight schedules, deadlines to hit and multiple demands on everyone’s time – and so we strive to keep our people happy and healthy to meet those challenges. We have an imaginative and varied programme which includes; providing fruit, a wide variety of teas and coffees, breakfast cereals, organising mindfulness classes, fitness taster sessions, and desk-based massage. We work with local, independent suppliers to nourish our minds as well as our bodies. We are proud to have been named one of Broadcast’s Top Places to Work in TV for the last three years and have been a member of the Workplace Wellbeing Charter since 2015. If you are a supplier, please get in touch with our Operations team.

Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity for Icon Films is about creating an inclusive and representative workplace where everyone can thrive, and ensuring our teams are sustained and challenged to do their best work. We know an inclusive, diverse workforce increases creativity and productivity and we nurture and support new and emerging talent as they develop across the company. We show our commitment to diversity in many ways, including outreach work with local partnering organisations. Inclusive recruitment practices ensure our company is accessible to all.

Our City

Innovators, disruptors, rebels, creatives come to Bristol to live and work. It is the fastest growing city in the UK and regularly named as one of the best places to live and work. It is a home to a media sector of scale and international reach, spanning genres from animation to natural history and entertainment. Bristol has an important tech cluster, where tech giants and digital start ups co-exist with academia, cultural institutions and creative businesses to build new platforms, new user experiences and new business models. It is a multicultural city where 92 languages are spoken. It is our home.

Our Office

Our office interior reflects our philosophy of creating a low carbon, beautiful and functional environment in which people can do their best work. Our cutting rooms have natural light, our kitchen is spacious and bright and functions at night as a social hub and cinema, there are works of art and our ever-increasing collections of curiosities around the office. Why? We believe people need space to have ideas and achieve their potential.

Sustainability

At Icon Films, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. As wildlife filmmakers we’re privileged to witness our planet’s unique environments. However, this also means we have a responsibility to show the way our world is changing through our programming, and to reduce the effects our operations have on local and global environments.

Icon films is an albert affiliate, with much of our programming earning three-star ratings. Albert is the BAFTA-run initiative working with the screen industries to eliminate waste and carbon emissions from productions and encourage industry creatives to bring sustainability stories to its editorial content. Some of the ways we’ve made our production practices more sustainable recently include filming international episodes back to back to reduce flights, adopting sustainable transport methods like trains rather than cars, using LED lights on set and using international fixers to reduce crew travelling from the UK to remote locations.

We also do lots to make sure our office runs sustainably in the day-to-day. We were Bristol’s first Going for Gold Food Champion and we’ve partnered with Geneco’s Bio Bee to turn our food waste into biofuel.

Our green team have implemented small adjustments that have led to big changes; by printing documents double sided and turning our meetings print free we’ve saved over 160,000 sheets of paper over the last two years. Our HR department has also gone paperless through DocuSign. We have a virtual ban on single use coffee cups and water bottles, supplying reusable coffee cups from local company Boston Tea Party for our employees.

Our environmental policy is focussed on accepting responsibility for our productions’ impact on our planet and committing ourselves to reducing that impact in Bristol and beyond.

In December 2019, Icon Films declared a climate emergency. You can find out more about our commitment here.