ABOUT

ALEX VERNER - BIO

Brought up on the Atlantic shores of Ireland’s west coast, Alex Verner’s early fascination with wilderness, light, and landscape shaped his instinct for cinematic imagery and emotive storytelling. Long before he picked up a camera, his eye for detail was honed through architectural model making, a discipline that demanded precision, patience, and an intuitive sense of form and composition—qualities that would later define his approach as a filmmaker.

His filmmaking career began far from home, deep in Southern Africa’s remote landscapes, where he worked in Botswana’s specialist safari industry before transitioning into wildlife television production. Camera work on projects like BBC’s Elephants Without Borders, David Attenborough’s Nature’s Great Events, and National Geographic’s Night of the Lion earned him recognition and brought him back to the UK, where he pivoted from the big five to big bikes, joining the principal photography team on the acclaimed, theatrically released TT3D: Closer to the Edge, the definitive film on the Isle of Man TT.

This move into high-intensity action cinematography led naturally into the world of commercial filmmaking, where he worked with globally recognized brands such as Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, Goodyear, and the UFC—where he remains a regular series director for their flagship show, UFC Countdown. His deep interest in technology and performance saw him lead the creative development of a groundbreaking experiment with Audi Sport and Imperial College London, analyzing A.I. systems versus elite human drivers—a project that resulted in a credited paper in Nature and established him as a sought-after creative authority in artificial intelligence storytelling.

In 2021, Verner took a deeply personal creative leap, directing Jack B. Yeats: The Man Who Painted Ireland, a philosophical, visually rich documentary produced by Averner Films for RTÉ, written with bestselling author Colm Tóibín and narrated by Pierce Brosnan. The film was described by The Irish Times as “hauntingly beautiful”, nominated for a Royal Television Society Award, and won the Master of Art Film Festival’s top prize before being acquired by Sky Arts.

In 2023, his long-standing fascination with artificial intelligence culminated in Cyborg Society, an original 60-minute documentary produced with Free Turn, CAA, and BAFTA-winning Executive Producer Adam Gee. His most recent work, Christy Brown: Self Portrait (RTÉ, 2024), featuring Saoirse Ronan and narrated by Aidan Gillen, was widely praised as a definitive exploration of Brown’s life and creative legacy.

Whether in broadcast, commercial, or cutting-edge digital content, Verner’s work is defined by a sharp visual instinct, an innate feel for pacing and tone, and an ability to explore complex subjects with depth and cinematic clarity.