Copenhagen, the capitol of Denmark, is a quiet, cloudy city with friendly people and a truly impressive bicycle-oriented commuting infrastructure. But as progressive as it is, there is at least one industry on which Copenhagen is still catching up.

“When I left Denmark in 1999, there was no such thing as motion graphics,” said Anders Schroder, creative director for the Copenhagen-based, design-oriented motion graphics company Frame. “That discipline just didn’t exist.”

Seeking a career in that very field, Schroder left his homeland to travel and work in far-flung corners of the world. He lived in Washington DC, London, New York, Australia and Los Angeles. And in each new place, at each new job, he picked up new skills.

“It started out being graphic design for web and then flash came and then all of a sudden you needed to be able to animate,” Schroder said. “And then I went from flash animation to real animation, and then we needed live-action plates, so someone needed to direct those, and that was usually me, and that turned into a passion. It all happened organically, not as something I set out to do.”

At a certain point in the early 2000s, Schroder found himself adrift. He was in LA with the option to return to New York or London “or wherever,” he said, and nothing seemed quite right. Then an intriguing offer presented itself from one of his ongoing freelance gigs, a company run by a designer named Thomas Bay, who was producing motion graphics for broadcast clients in Copenhagen.

In Los Angeles at the time, “every second or third commercial on TV had some motion graphics in it,” Schroder said, “but in Denmark, it was maybe one out of 50.” The TV business, however, was “a lot more advanced in that field,” and Bay had stayed busy there building a robust career designing promos and on-air graphics for the European broadcasting giant Viasat Sport.

“I tried to persuade Anders all the time,” Bay said. “I said, ‘I have tons of jobs… what about coming to Denmark?’”

Schroder came, and became a partner with Bay at the company that would come to be called Frame. In Frame’s early years, the company subsisted largely on title sequences and other projects coming from television, but as time went on, Denmark’s commercial scene has caught on, if slowly, to the rapidly advancing world of motion graphics.

With Schroder as the company’s one and only director for many years (more recently, a second director, Tom Crate, has also been helming productions), Frame has lent an auteur’s vision to each and very project, and its cumulative body of work is intriguingly diverse. Stylistically, the company has proven to be as deft with raw, in-your-face realism as it is with contemplative abstraction, and everything in between.

Today, Frame’s client list includes the likes of Mobil1 motor oil and Porsche, Carlsberg and WeBank, though television continues to be the source of some of its most unforgettable work, and has taken the company to some unforgettable places. Among those, Frame seems to have found a rather unexpected niche “doing a lot of stuff for the Middle East,” Schroder said, including the PromaxBDA Gold Award-winning titles for Al Jazeera’s America Tonight, and a series of eight idents for the rebrand of the United Arab Emirates channel Abu Dhabi Sports TV, which launched in August. “It’s not a market that we’ve been chasing. It’s just happened organically,” Schroder continued.

Working in the Middle East is “really cool,” Schroder said, “sometimes cooler than here in terms of how you interact.” When people like or don’t like something, they let you know, he continued, and once you’ve earned the trust of a client, it grants you a surprising amount of creative freedom. “You look at each other in the eyes and there’s that thing of, ‘can I trust you?’ ‘Yes, you can trust me. I promise I’ll make this awesome for you.’ ‘All right, I’ll be out of your hair then.’”

Frame earned the trust of its Middle Eastern clients, opening the door for a high level of imagination and innovation in the works for both Al Jazeera and AD (Abu Dhabi) Sports TV. On the intricate America Tonight sequence, data and statistics materialize on transparent sheets overlaying images that represent the key issues of the day, such as housing, healthcare and education. Adding yet another layer, the sheets are held in place by visible hands, bringing a subtle human element to the proceedings that enhance the notion “that there are many views on a topic, both negative and positive,” Schroder said.

With AD Sports TV, Frame was brought in to execute a concept by the Dubai-based design house Les Folies Design Haus and its executive creative director Obeida Sidani. Aiming to make the city itself a character in the new brand, Sidani’s vision involved transforming some of Abu Dhabi’s most iconic landmarks into the surfaces of athletes’ chosen sports. Built around the message of “every ground can be your playground,” the brief involved animating the grounds in front of each structure as the athletes performed atop them, turning them into fields, boxing rings, tennis courts and other sports arenas.

To say that Frame took this seemingly simple idea and ran with it would be an understatement of vast proportions. Schroder set out to shoot the idents in way that would mimic the synthetic, HDR look typically associated with sports photography. The results would resemble a kind of living video game, but setting images like that in motion was a spectacularly complicated process. According to the brief, the athletes and the buildings behind them had to be equally represented at all times, meaning the foreground and the background had to both be in focus in every frame. The footage was to be shot at night on a Phantom camera, which picks up thousands of frames per second, and “requires an insane amount of light in order for people to show up,” said Schroder. But “if you bathe the foreground in light, the background, which is the buildings, would disappear.”

Schroder created the double-layered compositions for each ident through multiple exposures, first picking up the extremely well-lit athletes, then picking up the extremely well-lit structures behind them using a motion-controlled camera rig. Then, in post, the two separate exposures were made as one.

“Everything you see on film is in camera,” Schroder said, “except for the animating floors and dust trails.” All in all, the shoot required a crew of around 60 people, and was epic enough to warrant a making-of video all to its own.

Abu Dhabi Sports TV shows Frame’s flexibility in terms of both style and scope. The flip-side of the project’s massive logistical scale is apparent in a promo the company did for Danish soccer league Superliga last year in which they turned a deft ball-juggler’s routine into a riveting digital performance art installation. The spot won yet another PromaxBDA Gold award for Frame, making the simplicity of its creation seem all the more impressive.

“We pretty much just shot a guy doing his thing with the ball,” said Schroder. “Literally this was one camera guy, his assistant and a guy holding a lamp over his head… It was just cool animation and then getting this guy to do it.”

In part because “it’s difficult to get talent” to move to Copenhagen, Frame remains small, with less than 10 full-time staffers, and scales up when it needs to. But in smallness there lies agility, which is the fuel of ambitious and imaginative execution.

“We just want to try something new every time,” said Schroder. “It’s kind of scary because you can’t master all genres, but that’s what gets me excited – that I don’t feel bound. It’s just as cool doing a crazy Porsche mechanical thing as it is to be on the streets of London shooting hooligans. As long as it’s exciting and there’s a little but of tension somewhere, then I like it.”

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