Startup Spotlight: Lucky Frame

Each Friday Startup Spotlight features a Scottish tech startup, giving a brief overview of the company, what they do, where they are and who they are. The aim is to, as the name suggests, put the spotlight on Scotland’s best startups. This week Edinburgh based Lucky Frame.

Lucky Frame is a creative studio. They make products that focus on new approaches to music and games. Their work tends to be quirky, strange, and wonderful such as the crazy Pugs Luv Beats and the brilliant Bad Hotel.

The Lucky Frame team is made up of Yann Seznec, who handles the sound and music side of things, as well as most of the physical hardware building for the projects that need it. Jonathan Brodsky is the technical/coder/programmer, who also does a lot of game design and prototyping and Sean McIlroy is the artist and designer.

The Lucky Frame office is in Out Of The Blue, on Dalmeny Street in Edinburgh. Out Of The Blue is a collection of studios for artists and creative companies. This fits Lucky Frame nicely as they all three members of the team come from an artistic background originally.

In the four years since being founded Lucky Frame has been funded in a number of different ways. They started out with support from EPIS and NESTA Starter for 6, which helped get Lucky Frame going. They undertook a fair amount of consulting and contract development before starting to seriously release our their apps, which eventually led to investment from Channel 4 and Creative Scotland.

Yann founded Lucky Frame after his Wii controller music hack received a large amount of attention on the internet and eventually in more traditional media (resulting in an appearance on Dragons’ Den). Making music software for the Wii turned out to not be a very good idea, but it did lead to him focusing on interesting approaches to music and game design in general. Yann says “On a personal level, I am somebody that really likes working on my own projects. Over the past few years having a small company has been the best way to develop my crazy ideas and projects at as high a level as possible.”

For a taste of what to expect from Lucky Frame hop over to the Lucky Frame YouTube Channel and check out the many excellent videos such as this one for Pugs Luv Beats:

Lucky Frame recently launched a new version of Bad Hotel and did a fantastic follow up post on their blog which I would also encourage you to have a look at. It includes facts, figures and a lot of fantastic suggestions for those releasing mobile apps in the near future.

Their apps are a lot of fun, if you have an iOS device I can highly recommend giving them a shot.