A good dose of irony, creativity and personal ambition come together to form Studio Freak, a small studio near the Botanical Garden in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Diego Zuberbühler, with a degree in communications and experience in web design, and Juan Sparano, graphic designer and art director for several motion graphics studios, discovered the perfect formula to unleash their dreams.

In 2006, the combination of a background in animation and 3D helped them create “a space to generate different techniques,” distinguishing the pair from studios who were focused “on one graphic style or a single way of working,” say Diego and Sparano.

Thus studioFREAK was born, and the firm has been busy ever since with a long list of clients such as Ogilvy & Mather, Turner Broadcasting, HBO Latin America and the Flehnerfilms production company. Today, they work for such TV clients as Discovery Networks Latin America group, Fox International Channels, Fox Latin America, HBO Latin America, NBC-Universal and Viacom Networks, among others.

With a mix of humor and irony, they thought the word “freak” was the best way to demonstrate that it’s not necessary to be eccentric in order to be creative. Instead, they say, what is necessary is to be unique.

The studio was complete with the arrival of Gabriel Sagel, a commercial filmmaker, whom they met thanks to Flehnerfilms. Sagel — who had also worked as VP, creative services for Cartoon Network and TNT Latin America and who founded In Jaus — came to them with an urgent request involving the post-production of a documentary project he was directing for BBC-Discovery. Impressed by the quality and accountability of their work, he suggested forming a partnership.

In 2012, Gabriel joined Studio Freak, adding the last piece to the puzzle. Juan brings his experience in design, motion and art direction; Diego contributes his creative background in animation and production; and Gabriel adds the strategic look and feel of a screenwriter and filmmaker.

Since then, all three men say with confidence that they can complete any project they can imagine, under an imprint they define as “creativity with strategy.”

This creativity is inspired by the world itself, where they draw inspiration from personal experiences, movies, video games and the work of colleagues. Those sources offer a range of styles and techniques: 2D, 3D, live-action and mixed media.

One of their most open projects was the series of animated shorts, Fantasmagorías for HBO Plus, a channel that’s aimed at a younger audience and dedicated to horror. The work was the most-watched online content in the channel’s history and won two PromaxBDA awards: a Global Excellence Silver Award and a Latin America Gold Award.

RELATED: HOT SPOT: HBO Plus Fantasmagorias

Raúl Hernández Mezerhane, vice president, on-air creative, HBO Latin America, had worked with Studio Freak in the early days of branding HBO Plus.

“We were very satisfied with the work,” he says “and decided to make them a new proposal.”

Starting from a very general brief, the agency created the pilot episode of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman).

“We wanted to give the studio creative freedom to develop the project, and we only provided general guidelines such as: short content animated format, Latin American horror stories and legends, innovative look and feel,” said Mezerhane.

When he needed a promotional campaign for new series How to Win at Everything, Teco Brandao, creative director at Fox Network Group Brazil, Studio Freak was recommended to him.

“When we looked through their portfolio, we had no doubts,” he says.

For this campaign in particular, Brandao came up with the idea of using figures in the style of Toy Story, to tell the show’s story. The resulting promo is a combination of animation and live action, and the studio reimagined those Toy Story figures as soldiers, which was “much more realistic,” says Brandao. “They delivered a beautiful 3D piece, including details such as using bandages to cover wounds,” he concludes.

A recent project is the Super Bowl 50 branding Super Freak did for Fox Sports.

Working with Arquímedes García, on-air creative director at Fox Networks Group Latin America, Studio Freak created the entire graphics package. Given that the NFL chose a gold palette as the reference for the 50-year-old event, Studio Freak started off with the concept: “We are gold.”

“At Studio Freak, they are experts in everything that has to do with liquid animation. I imagined a play between solid matter that takes more organic shapes, which then transforms itself,” says Archimedes. When the project came in, García knew “they were the right team to support this.”

Of all these projects, the series of ten idents for Paramount Channel was technically the most complex one for the studio, in which the concept “we are made of stars” was developed using particles with 3D technique.

Martín Florio, creative director at Paramount Channel and Comedy Central for Latin America, says “we wanted to make pieces of good visual quality, that related to the emotions of the films and that were aligned with the on-air branding, but taking it all to a whole new level.”

Particles did the trick:

Studio Freak continues to work on other projects, including the rebranding of the show La última palabra (The Last Word) for Fox Sports México, the rebranding of the Discovery Kids channel or the second season of Fantasmagorías, about which Hernández Mezerhane says “will be visually even more shocking” with “absolutely terrifying scripts.”

All in all, at Studio Freak styles and backgrounds converge, so that “all the pieces we make have stories to tell.”

To read this story in Spanish, click here.

Tags:


  Save as PDF