Hi, I'm Frank Bosma, a freelance creative developer from Amsterdam.
I love to create, and to connect people with purpose through play. Whether that’s online or offline.
When not developing you can catch me designing t-shirts, on a skateboard, dancing at a music festival, making playlists, playing at my foosball club or reading a good book.
I have been developing since 2001 and keeping up with this ever evolving landscape of languages, libraries and methodologies means there's never a dull moment. Below a selection of projects.
The Imaginary Friend is a surrealistic interactive and cinematic Virtual Reality experience in which you will be present in the story through the imagination of the main character. The 7-year-old boy named Daniel with extremely vivid imagination has made a new friend: you, the spectator. Through making use of volumetric video capture (technology from 4drstudios) for the main character, we are trying to involve the viewer as intimately as possible.
The Imaginary Friend had its international premiere and was in competition at Venice Immersive 2023 and will be shown during the Netherlands Film Festival and Cinekid late 2023.
Kids grow up in a world where online and offline are merging. The library of the future wants to welcome everyone into this world and let you become one of its co-creators. The Spacebeest installation represents making, playing and a sense of belonging. Together with OBA's (Amsterdam Public Library) Ontwerplab I created an installation where kids could turn their analog drawings into digital, moving and interactive creatures, while learning about digitizing and coding through play. The installation toured in libraries around Amsterdam as well as the Eindhoven library during the Dutch Design Week.
with OBA's Ontwerplab
more infoAs part of the STRP festival 2022 in Eindhoven I developed an Augmented Reality project with designer duo HyperCulture and audio studio EJJI, called INFINITY. This collection of audio-virtual works of art are only on display at carefully selected physical locations. At STRP that will be the Heuvel galerie shopping mall. A mall that since Corona has seen numerous shops disappear, leaving empty physical spaces. What will be the future of these spaces in an ever growing digital shopping culture?
created for HyperCulture
infoI have been and am working on Virtual Reality projects for storyteller and artist Abner Preis, who portrays the present reality from a hopeful vantage point in his new media works. I work on the VR coding and animations of his with Google Tilt Brush drawn scenes.
2023 - On display at the Amsterdam Museum is VR experience 'Blooming in a Ring of Fire, containing 5 stories of women on the run. In co-creation with Zoe d'Amaro.
2022 - On display at the Amsterdam Museum is VR experience 'Corona in de stad', a 3 story piece on the influence of Corona the past years.
2021 - Official Cinekid selection, part of IDFA DocLab Spotlight and Venice Immersive 2022, The Miracle Basket shows the need for humanity to reconnect with our environment and our ancestor's knowledge to avoid disassociation and a demise of our planet through our consumerist behaviour. The Miracle Basket is also on display at the Museum Arnhem.
2021 - A short VR movie on The Golden Rule is on display at the Jewish History Museum.
2021 - For Hewlett-Packard we created a short VR movie about working from home of which you can see a video version online.
Symbiosis is a multiuser and multisensory Mixed Reality experience inspired by the work of science historian and philosopher Donna Haraway, that takes place 200 years in the future in a post-human biotope of artificial or enhanced biochemcial life. It allows every participant to embody a post-human or even nonhuman reality: a completely symbiotic human-animal or human-technologic relationship. Symbiosis won the IDFA award for Best Creative Technology 2021 and was part of IDFA Doclab's 2020 Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction.
Made for Polymorf
goFor Fondation Constant I coached and helped teams of young writers and scenographers to create 4 Mixed Reality installations based on artist Constant Nieuwenhuijs' work New Babylon and the 3D visualization of Constant's Yellow Sector by artist Dennis Molema. In Enter New Babylon the teams give their take on Constant's ideas of a world for playful and creative humans. All 4 installations were on display at Over het IJ festival 2021 in Amsterdam.
Distance Disco is a digital matchmaking dance party: find the person dancing to your song! With Covid-19 keeping us away from concerts & festivals how do we get our dancing juices flowing? Well, just turn on your webcam open a browser and let's go. Host your own party or join one of the regulars (check the Eventbrite page).
As part of the Distance Disco team
Create your own discoIn the Futurotheek, an AR face filter installation, we discover, step by step, the strange, beautiful, absurd and at times dangerous influence of what happens when your face becomes data and a commercial property in a future that is increasingly difficult to predict. The Futurotheek is a concept by Leonieke Verhoog and Sander Veenhof and was part of Nederlands Film Festival and Cinekid in 2020.
as a co-developer
Backstory and more (Dutch)Dustin is a mobile, interactive Augmented Reality story about our relationship with smart devices. In this case an AI vacuum cleaner called Dustin. The mobile app integrates with native functions like your calendar and photo library to really let Dustin become part of your daily life. Dustin is nominated for the Gouden Kalf Digitale Cultuur award of the Nederlands Film Festival 2021.
Made for VPRO, with writer Niels 't Hooft
get the appA 13-minute room scale Virtual Reality war epos, set in the Eastern-Ukrainian war zone of 2014 for which I did the VR coding and 3D modeling. It was part of IDFA Doclab's 2019 competition for Immersive Non-Fiction and is still viewable on request.
Made as part of Studio ZZZap
learn moreI’ve worked as a front end developer in a small scrum team at innovative Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. We not only developed the sites and API’s of our company, but also of other Dutch broadcasters and platforms like Human.nl, 2doc.nl and the back end of NPO Start. Besides that we created mobile apps and numerous experimental projects to explore new ways of storytelling.
With Hackastory I’ve coached and coded during numerous international hackathons (short, creative pressure cooker events), where we helped media companies around the world finding solutions to complex problems in the media industry. It feels good to watch a group of people that often never met before, team up, come up with crazy ideas that make them laugh, and then cheer when they realise them by working together, playing and letting go of boundaries and disciplines.
You're looking at it! The combination of a headless CMS like Strapi with React, GraphQL and Next.js for fast development feels really good and a personal site is a good subject for testing out stuff. Still a work in progress, but yeah as a developer when do you ever feel like your personal site is done ☺️.