Upcoming Workshops

MASTERS AT WORK: LINEN MILL STUDIOS and GAME OF THRONES

18th February at 7pm, The Century Club, 61-63 Shaftesbury Ave, London W1D 6LQ

To book your place email julie@iftuk.com

Moving on from Irish Film & Television UK’s nationwide St Brigid’s festival, we're delighted to return to our Masters at Work programme and welcome legendary studio manager, Andrew Webb, responsible for creating and managing the studio facilities behind Game of Thrones, one of the most distinctive and successful TV productions of all time, and then creating one of Ireland’s most successful visitor attractions.

Left-to-right: Andrew Webb, Steven Greenfields

Andrew Webb was working as Global Logistics Director for Ulster Weavers until May 2008 when he was tasked with decommissioning and transitioning its linen mill at Banbridge in Northern Ireland into a new mixed-use facility.

A chance encounter with a locations manager took him in a surprise direction and two years later Linen Mill Studios was born. Andrew worked in partnership with Northern Ireland Screen to repurpose the facility into a TV and film studio due to its size, scale and location making it an ideal filming location and logistics hub for the upcoming production of Game of Thrones. For the following eight years, Linen Mill Studios was a fundamental part of the success of Game of Thrones and its impact on the Northern Ireland TV & film landscape.

As Game of Thrones was nearing its final season, there was an opportunity to embrace the success of the series both to a global audience but also as an iconic tourist attraction for the island of Ireland. Andrew led a development team, in collaboration with HBO, to create a suitable legacy for Game of Thrones. The vision was to design and create an authentic Game of Thrones showpiece which encapsulated all the local and world-class skillsets demonstrated during the development of the show, in the country that produced it. And Game of Thrones Studio Tour opened in February 2022.

Andrew Webb will be interviewed by Steven Greenfields, formerly part of the executive team behind multiple Oscar- and Bafta-winning films by Neil Jordan and others at Scala Productions, and now an international lawyer with his own law firm and media company, as well as pro bono non-exec Vice-Chair at Irish Film & Television UK.