2006 - Freerange Future

2006

The beginning

Freerange Future became a real company on 19 July 2006 — registered, official, still operating from Nick’s lounge room.

The backstory was simple enough. After three years of freelancing, Nick was so busy maintaining old sites that he barely had time to build new ones. Something had to give. So he hired his partner Minka to wrangle the business side, and brought on Simon Gill as the first developer. (Simon went on to start his own agency — turns out the lounge room was a good launchpad.)

In those early days, Freerange worked mostly with ad agencies and design studios in Adelaide and Melbourne, turning their campaigns and brands into pixel-perfect Flash websites. We worked closely with local web agency Katalyst, and together we produced some of the most complex and engaging work of those years. Nick had already collaborated with Katalyst on Us Mob, which won an AIMIA award in early 2006. One of Freerange’s first projects picked up right where that left off.

FEATURED WORK

The Spoon Show

The Spike Milligan Legacy was a 2005 documentary about the life of the great, troubled comedian. For the 2006 DVD release, we worked with Katalyst to build a set of interactives — the hero being the Spoon Show, a four-track soundtrack mixer.

Built in Flash and distributed as Mac and PC apps installed straight from the DVD, this was genuinely fun to play with. It was stuffed full of samples from Spike Milligan’s solo career and his time on the Goon Show — music, jokes, sound effects — and you could drag and drop them onto a four-track player, layering up your own remix with a backing music track underneath.

The best part: creators could save their recordings to a web portal, where anyone could browse and listen to what other people had made. A community remix tool, years before that was really a thing.

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Nick and the guys from Katalyst with the 2006 AIMIA Award for Us Mob

2006 AIMIA Awards

Just before our story starts…

Katalyst’s 2005 project Us Mob was a massively ambitious interactive film about the adventures of kids in Alice Springs town camps — choose-your-own-adventure pathways, rich storytelling, and two spin-off platform games. It was a deserved winner of the Best Learning Award at the 2006 Australian Interactive Media Industry Association Awards, and Nick built the interface and those games.

This project was as good as anything being made in the world back then, and an unfortunate victim of the sorry state of digital preservation.

Here Nick celebrates the win with legends Jason Sidoryn, founder of Katalyst, and Chris Joyner, Katalyst’s digital producer on Us Mob.

Digital in 2006

Twitter launched. Facebook opened beyond universities. Google bought a little video site called YouTube for $1.65 billion (people thought they’d overpaid). “Google” was officially added to the dictionary.

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