General Mills

  • Video Production
  • Motion Design
  • Location recording

Working for General Mills UK team, our focus has been on creating UK market social campaigns & adapting Global & European campaigns to fit the unique UK audience & market objectives.

We’ve worked across their brands, including Old El Paso, Nature Valley, Petit Filous & Betty Crocker to deliver digital and social campaigns that drive awareness of new product & line extensions.

Sensorium

  • Software Design
  • Interaction Design
  • 360 Audio 

The Sensorium is an interactive experience that is unique, and creates the perfect space for body and mind. The room is specifically designed to relax you through sensory of sight, sound, smell and touch.

This is accomplished through 360 visuals with ultra-realistic 4k video, intelligent lighting, tactile vibration, aromatherapy and ground breaking sound technology.

This creates the ultimate immersion experience. 

Bright Lights, Big City

  • Mobile App Development
  • Game Production
  • Motion design

Our favourite projects are the ones we build from the ground up, as we did for our latest app for iOS, Android and web. From concept to completion – we love to develop artwork, scripts, game logic, storyboards, illustrations, animations, coding, testing and delivery of interactive apps and experiences.

Within this interactive graphic novel game, using gesture controls the gameplay involves re-arranging the sections of each scene, trying to find the correct order to progress through the level. From block puzzles, to outfit changes and customisation this game had many layers of game functionality which helped us bring this comic book adventure to life. 

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure Teaser

  • 3D Production
  • Asset design
  • Unity Development for Mobile

Freak were asked to produce a trailer for UsTwo games latest mobile masterpiece Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.

Ustwo games are the design visionaries behind the multi-award winning Monument Valley series of games. The development of the trailer for their new game involved working alongside them and agency Maverick to produce a new working Unity engine build of the game. This included adding new 3D assets and characters, managing the cinematography and virtual environments, and producing new code for the final output.

The result was a beautiful, bespoke trailer for an awesome game, featuring footage and elements not found anywhere else.

GoGo Penguin

  • Video Production
  • Audio Design

GoGo Penguin have been hailed as the “Radiohead of British Jazz”, but they draw equally on rock, jazz and minimalist influences, alongside the intricacy of Aphex Twin or Four Tet to create their punchy, experimental, but always beautiful music. This very special live film – GoGo Penguin Live from Studio Two was filmed at the legendary Studio Two at Abbey Road Studios, London. Studio Two is a unique space, part myth, part sacred space, and Freak were delighted to direct the full, one-hour live film there for this genre-bending band.

Wu Massacre

  • Animation Production
  • Audio production
  • Motion design

We love to bring static art to life through digital trickery. We also love comics, graphic novels and animations.

So… when one of our favourite hip hop artists and bona fide global legends of the genre reimagined themselves as superheroes on their Wu Massacre album… there could only be one outcome – we created our vision of an animated music promo video for the mighty Wu Tang Clan.

 

SQUAREPUSHER

  • Video production
  • Audio production
  • Motion design
  • Visual Styling

Squarepusher is one of the leading lights of innovative electronic music. His impossible-to-define sound finds its natural home on famed independent label WARP, home to the most inspired creative minds to grace the music landscape in the last 25 years.

Freak was founded on music video production, and we were in our creative element to produce this video. We used a mixture of live footage taken from his show at the Barbican, London, and motion graphics produced both in-house at Freak and by manipulating Squarepusher’s own stunning visuals from his ground breaking AV tour.

Squarepusher
Squarepusher
Squarepusher
Squarepusher
Squarepusher

The A­-Z of YouTube

  • Sound design
  • Mix

We worked with directors Adam Bolt and Hoku Uchiyama at Partizan on this celebration of YouTube’s 10th Year Anniversary.

It was a huge project featuring 74 references to some of YouTube’s best known video clips, and employing over 15 different animation techniques involving amazing artists from around the world.

Process

We began by going through and working out what audio was usable from the YouTube clips, as a lot of these were recorded on phones or other devices with no proper microphones. Therefore we had to do some audio restoration to clean up the recordings and make them sound as good as possible. After this we dropped in the amazing Blackalicious track Alphabet Aerobics and set to work designing the background ambiences, sound effects and transition sounds needed to tie the image, music, and sync sound together, and to bring the video to life. WIth so many elements needing bespoke sounds created by us, we ended up with over 300 audio tracks all stacked with effects being used for this 2:45 video.

Climate Coalition

  • Sound design
  • Mix

As lovers of the wild and Scotland especially, we were very pleased to work with director Richard Paris Wilson on this ad for the Climate Coalition.

The film was created to serve as a reminder of mankind’s connection with nature and offer food for thought about the fragility of our planet.

This was used by the Climate Coalition, to promote their ‘Go for Zero’ campaign, after the IPCC’s devastating report about the impact of Climate Change.

PROCESS

This brief was all about adding emotional weight and tying together the beautifully shot landscapes and the more abstract images to create a powerful amalgamation of sound and image.

We began by using our extensive sound library to evoke the landscapes and bring the natural world to life, adding original sound creations from analogue hardware for elements such as atmospheres and drones to instill a sense of urgency, finally designing sound effects to give impact and movement to the more abstract images.

When approaching the dialogue, we wanted a sense of intimacy to give the impression that the narrator is speaking to you, up close, directly into your ear.

The music is a powerful part of this film so we made sure that the sound design was embedded into this and didn’t just sit on top. The finished soundtrack is a hyperreal sound journey where at times it’s difficult to discern where the music stops and the sound design begins.

PAUL SMITH

  • Location recording
  • Sound design
  • Broadcast mix

World Championship cyclist Ben Savage put the new range of Paul Smith suits to the test at London’s Hauser & Wirth Gallery on a set designed by Sonja Klaus.

Freak provided end-to-end audio services, including location audio on set and post production audio.

PROCESS

We started by composing an electronic music track, crafted from recordings made with a bike to complement the imagery. Director Michael Tamman liked the bike sounds so much that we were asked if we could compose the track entirely of bike sounds. Always seeking a challenge, we broke out the contact microphones and proceeded to create bass drums from hitting the tires with drum sticks, more percussive sounds by recording the chain, gear and brake levers, and drones using the cello bow on the spokes. With this palette of sounds we hit the studio to process our recordings until we achieve the final result, with what sounds like warped vocals singing over the top at the end.

The final composition is composed entirely of bike recordings made in the Freak sound studio and we got so carried away with this one that we even coded our own bespoke software sampler / manipulator, to be released soon, as we couldn’t find anything suitable off the shelf to create what we were hearing in our heads!