In the mid 2000s, Vital Media officially became Fraktiv, and with a new name came a greater service offering and more capacity in the form of new studios with an integrated sound recording facility in (groovy) Carnaby Street. Fraktiv also moved from SD to HD/2K post production pipelines, enabling higher-end production and delivery.
From providing editing and finishing services for short films such as ‘Basho’ (dir: Babak Gray) and ‘My Tumour & I’ (dir: Tom Shrapnel) to filming, editing and directing multiple promos, in-house TV episodes and corporates for Toni&Guy, TIGI and label.m, our portfolio was constantly growing. With a background in engineering, da Costa’s love of action and motorsports also found a creative avenue, with the development of one of the first in-car multi-camera POV recording systems, around two years before GoPro cameras existed. The system was deployed at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany, in a race-spec Renault Clio driven by current BBC Top Gear presenter, Chris Harris, along with his 24-hour endurance team.
Alongside the ‘special projects’, we continued to develop our more down-to-earth services, working with ITV to develop web advertising assets for brands such as OXY, Nestlé, Weetabix and several toy manufacturers. When it came to toys and gadgets, IWantOneOfThose.com (IWOOT) was one of the biggest players in the market, so we were honoured to create two national campaign Christmas TV commercials for the brand in 2007 – where we were the first UK company to use Panasonic’s P2 system for a TV commercial – and 2008, as well as a TV advertorial for GoPro’s HERO 3 camera in 2012. We also began working in the arts alongside director Patrick Dickinson from Story B, creating a range of promotion films for the V&A and British Museum, including working with Sir Derek Jacobi CBE.
With a significant amount of broadcast work under our belt, Fraktiv won the contract for a total of sixty 1-hour travel shows – ‘Inside Luxury Travel’ and ‘Culinary Travels’ – for Travel Channel and its international partners, with da Costa associate-producing, editing, undertaking voiceover recordings, grading, mastering and delivering the shows over a four year period. In tandem, Fraktiv worked with some of the best known luxury hotel brands – One & Only Resorts, Raffles International and Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts amongst others – to produce corporate and customer-facing website content.
In the early 2010s, after a move from Soho to a purpose-built studio in Battersea, south west London, Fraktiv also developed a new focus on its long-held passion for action sports, with the aim of combining high-end cinematography and video production with its established editing and post production services. With our history of camera work in the high-pressure fashion and hairdressing industry and the advent of specialist HD and 4K cameras, Fraktiv’s new sister brand – geebeebee media, co-founded with Farah Ahmed – was soon producing high-end promos, short films and documentaries. We were even selected by Sony to be the first UK facility to shoot action sports content on their prototype NEX-FS700 camera, several months before its release.
With an acquisition-to-delivery production pipeline in place through geebeebee media, Fraktiv could now offer further services to existing as well as new clients such as Men’s Health and Nespresso, for whom we developed and created viral web and in-store digital promotional content.
We also continued to develop long term partnerships with directors such as Babak Gray, on his second short film, ‘For Zeta’ (starring Colin Tierney), architectural visualisation studio Pixel Aspect and production company Story B. 2013 also marked Fraktiv’s first feature film work, creating motion graphics for ‘The Patrol’ (dir: Tom Petch), which went on to win the 21st Raindance Film festival award for Feature Film of the Festival.