Welcome to the Mind of Aidan Judd
AJ Design FX is the creative world of Aidan Judd: designer, maker, performer, and storyteller. A place where sketching, fabrication, theatre, fantasy, practical effects, and world-building meet to create physical pieces with character, function, and imagination.
Set Designer | Prop Maker | Practical Effects Creative
I design and build physical worlds for stage, screen, performance, and immersive storytelling.
My work brings together set design, prop making, practical effects, sculptural fabrication, and character-focused detail. From sci-fi helmets and stage weapons to theatrical set pieces and creature costume work, I create objects that do more than fill a space. They help tell the story.
With a background in Product Design from NCAD, I approach each project with a balance of creative vision, practical problem-solving, and hands-on making. Whether the brief calls for durability, actor comfort, visual impact, or believable world-building, I focus on creating pieces that perform under real conditions.
Featured Work
Explore a selection of theatre props, set design work, costume builds, and practical effects pieces created for live performance and creative production.
What I Do
Prop Design and Making
Set Design
Sci-Fi and Fantasy Props
Theatre and Performance Builds
Practical Effects
Costume and Character Pieces
Concept Development
Repair, Adaptation, and Finishing
Built for Story. Made by Hand.
Every piece begins with the needs of the production: the performer, the director, the audience, and the world of the story. My aim is to create work that looks striking, functions reliably, and gives a production a stronger physical presence.
About Aidan Judd
For as long as I can remember, art has been a huge part of my life.
It began with crayons, sketchbooks, and, occasionally, the walls of my parents’ house. It followed me into scout halls, schoolbooks, margins, scraps of paper, and every quiet moment where doodling became a way to escape the mundane and step into my own imagination.
That imagination was not only drawn on paper. It lived in movement, performance, and physical expression. I have been horse riding since the age of eleven, developing an instinctive respect for balance, control, discipline, and presence. I still remember watching Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on a family staycation and seeing Darth Maul ignite his double-bladed lightsaber. That moment sparked a lifelong fascination with swordplay, staged combat, fantasy worlds, and the physical language of characters.
Since then, that interest has grown through two years of longsword combat training, a love of Viking lore, theatre, and film, and experience as a film extra on a range of sets. These experiences shaped the way I think about design. A prop is not just an object. A costume is not just something worn. A set is not just a background. Each one must work with the performer’s body, movement, story, and presence.
Over the last four years, I have also delved deeply into the Forgotten Realms through Dungeons and Dragons, taking on the demanding role of Game Master. Running a campaign means building worlds, shaping characters, guiding atmosphere, managing tension, and creating stories that respond to the people inside them. That experience has been instrumental in my development as an actor and voice actor, teaching me how to think through character, motivation, pacing, and immersion.
From there, I found the courage to take the plunge into my own homebrew worlds, including grim, far-future settings inspired by the 41st millennium. These projects pushed my world-building further, combining horror, science fiction, mythology, conflict, and practical design thinking into original fictional spaces.
Art has always been central to who I am. It shaped the way I think, the way I solve problems, and the way I see the world. That creative drive led me to NCAD, the National College of Art and Design, where I developed my artistic ability and began to understand the wider world of design. There, my interest in drawing, making, and storytelling grew into a practical understanding of the physical world, materials, form, and function.
That journey eventually shaped me into the designer and maker I am today: someone who brings fictional worlds, stage environments, characters, and props into physical reality.
But the path was not always straightforward.
For seven years, I stepped away from my craft. I worked in the construction industry, learning the discipline, pressure, and reality of building in the real world. I gained experience in demanding environments, including the high-rise world of crane coordination, where precision, planning, safety, and problem-solving are essential.
That time taught me a trade. It sharpened my practical skills. But it also took me away from the young creative at my core.
Now, after years away from the work that first lit me up, I have returned to my roots with renewed focus and unwavering determination. With five years of set design experience, seven years of construction exposure, hands-on performance experience, practical world-building, a lifelong love of the fantastical, and a deep thirst for telling good stories, I am ready to bring that experience into new creative projects.
My work is driven by imagination, craft, movement, character, and the belief that fictional worlds become more powerful when they can be seen, touched, worn, held, moved through, and believed.
Craft and Process
My work begins with the simplest tools: pen, paper, and the act of sketching an idea into shape. Drawing by hand allows me to think quickly, explore form, and find the character of a piece before it becomes too fixed. From there, I move into digital tools when the project calls for precision, refinement, scaling, or further development.
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I use 3D modelling and rapid prototyping as part of my design process, particularly when creating miniature set pieces, stage concepts, small-scale buildings, terrain, or objects that need to be understood physically before they are made at full size. I have a deep love for model making and small-scale world-building, whether for theatre, set design, or tabletop roleplaying games. There is something timeless in that craft: shaping a world by hand, piece by piece, until it begins to feel real.
Costume and prop building are also central to my practice. I work with EVA and CF foam to create lightweight costume pieces, helmets, armour, and performance props that can achieve a high level of finish while remaining practical for use. This approach is especially valuable when a piece needs to look strong, dramatic, or heavy, but still be comfortable and safe for the performer.
I also care deeply about function. A stage prop is not only there to be seen; it may need to be carried, lifted, swung, worn, dropped, revealed, or used as part of a specific stage direction. For that reason, I think about ergonomics, durability, weight, comfort, and safety throughout the making process.
Where necessary, a prop must be light enough to protect the actor and the audience, strong enough to survive repeated performance, and believable enough to support the world of the story. The aim is always to create pieces that feel right in the hand, read clearly from the stage, and help the performer do their work with confidence.