While growing up, Ian Baker was fascinated by science fiction movies with monsters in them. “I’ve always been a ‘creature freak,’ he says. “Seeing the special effects in Alien, Terminator, Toy Story…or anything from Pixar and DreamWorks Animation….I really wanted to be a digital animator because it looked so cool!” So he went to Middle Tennessee State University and majored in digital animation. But after working on a project that took three months just to produce 17-seconds of 3D animation, he decided to focus on a different type of visual fun. He learned After Effects, PhotoShop and video editing, and found those tools enabled him to flex his creativity in a shorter amount of time.
After graduating, Ian worked for a TV production company in Nashville before eventually moving to Memphis and joining Running Pony in 2015. As Digital Media Coordinator, he’s responsible for formatting, transferring, backing-up and archiving all the video footage that moves through the company on a daily basis. “The way I describe it to people is that I’m a glorified electronic librarian,” he laughs. The job is actually very complicated and requires great attention to detail. In addition, Ian also assists with creating graphics for the University of Memphis football and basketball games, and is part of the Running Pony technical crew that runs the video scoreboard at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.
When he’s not moving pixels, Ian spends his spare time moving miniature models across tabletop games. Or at least he did, until the pandemic made tabletop gaming with friends difficult. So instead, he started an online gaming community on Discord that now includes more than one hundred people around the world. “We sail on ships, drive fast cars, kill aliens…whatever we can to relieve stress,” he explains.
Other stress-relieving hobbies for Ian are his continuing infatuation with sci-fi creature features and taking care of his latest pet—an African egg-eating snake named Atticus, after a character in The Iron Druid Chronicles. “He has no teeth, so he can’t bite you” Ian says, “and he has no poison.” As for favorite movies, he lists Nightmare Before Christmas and Aliens at the top. He says he loves Nightmare so much, he watches it literally once a day during the month of October. And as for Aliens—well, his tattoo of the alien xenomorph gives you a hint why he likes that movie so much. “I root for the aliens every time,” he sighs, “but they never win.”
