Toby Pike

UNSW Art & Design Bachelor of Digital Media (now Media Arts) graduate Toby Pike is one half of the extraordinary Sydney-based creative duo Toby & Pete,who created the visual effects, light and stage displays for the 2016 ARIA multi-award winning artist Flume.

Toby & Pete are designers, directors, developers, and makers of almost anything that stretches the imagination. 

In addition to major promotional campaigns for companies like General Pants and the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, they’ve also produced and directed music videos and live set designs for Rüfüs (where they stretched digital skies and ocean floors between tree branches in a forest) and Liberation Music’s young talent, Grace Woodroofe (for whom they combined images of Grace wrapped in white stretch cloth, 3D imagery, and black ink secretions). 

For three years, Toby & Pete have worked with Australian record producer, musician and DJ Harley Streten, better known to the world as Flume. They devised the distinctive visual style that’s become synonomous with his music and persona, including the hexagonal Flume icon used in all of his videos, live performances, and promotional materials, and the Flume interactive prism - the source for the lighting displays used at his live performances, including the sold-out 2013 FLUME Australian tour, the tour for which he was awarded “Best Live Act” at the 2013 inthemix Awards. Toby & Pete say their goal was to create a new and powerful concert experience by seamlessly fusing the performer (Harley), the prism icon, the live visuals, and the overall stage lighting. 

To achieve this, they wired the performance and integrated live action motion graphics, CGI animation, and generative animations to be entirely audio reactive. Every audio signal from Harley’s laptop was put through a spectrum analysis and fed into the enveloping prism of the stage visuals. A total 181 different visual effects were programmed as potential responses to the music, thereby ensuring that Harley was directly orchestrating and driving the impact of the show. According to Harley, the “coolest” stage effect was also the simplest. Toby & Pete synced the drum pad to with explosive prism stage lights “so when I hit it,” says Harley, “it would make a huge impact… It was just power.”  

Toby & Pete have produced multiple award-winning music videos and live concert lighting and stage effects, including at the 2016 ARIA awards.