Annika White on FREAK is WILD: Building a Queer, Hyper-Sensual Universe from a Harlem Apartment

In Skuzland & Shygirl – FREAK is WILD, director Annika White and co-director Carl Knight transform a small Harlem apartment into a world without stable boundaries. Hyper-sensual performances move through mirrored rooms, tactile interiors, grotesque humor, and layered digital spaces, creating a visual universe where the freakish and the glamorous are not opposites, but part of the same liberated vocabulary.

The official music video for Skuzland and Shygirl’s collaboration track begins in a recognizable domestic setting and then repeatedly ruptures it. Rooms become fantasies. Bodies become architecture. A bathtub becomes a bowl of alphabet soup. A dental office mutates into a hot, latex-covered chamber. The result is camp, confrontational, playful, and visually exacting, yet it is also grounded in the chemistry of performers Jazzelle Zanaughtti and Robot Moonjuice, whose improvisational presence gives the video its unruly humanity.

Still from 'FREAK is WILD'

White came to filmmaking through photography and creative writing before moving to New York and studying at Pratt Institute. Her ongoing collaboration with Knight eventually led the pair to launch Clam Studios, a Brooklyn-based production company working across music videos, fashion films, commercial projects, and branded content. With FREAK is WILD, their creative partnership with Skuzland has now reached one of its most ambitious expressions.

The video was selected by SXSW London in 2026 and Director’s Library in 2026, affirming its place within a contemporary field where music video, fashion image, queer performance, and experimental cinema increasingly overlap.

For Final Cut Magazine, Annika White discusses the freedom of collaboration, the chaos of practical production, the influence of A Clockwork Orange, and why boldness and inclusion remain essential to the future of cinema.

Annika White

Annika, FREAK is WILD feels less like a conventional music video than a fully inhabited universe. What made you want to return to Skuzland after Poor Choices?

FREAK is WILD is the official music video for Skuzland and Shygirl’s collaboration track.

My co-director Carl Knight and I had previously collaborated with Skuzland on their Poor Choices music video, and we had so much fun making it that this project was a natural yes for us.

We all give one another the creative freedom and lack of judgment necessary to create the most unapologetic art possible, which is a very special occurrence.

It was incredibly inspiring to collaborate with Jazzelle Zanaughtti and Robot Moonjuice, the beautifully eccentric personalities who make up Skuzland. As natural-born performers, Jazzelle and Robot bring their most exciting work to every project. They often surpass the original direction through impeccable improvisation and a sense of unapologetic humanity that springs off the page and into a wondrous reality.

The film moves through several distinct spaces, yet almost everything was shot in one apartment. How did you turn such a limited location into something so expansive?

We shot the entire music video inside and outside Robot Moonjuice’s Harlem apartment.

Because it is an incredibly small space—and still very much a lived-in apartment—we had to collaborate closely with our wonderful production designer, Avvi, to figure out how to transform it into the many different environments we wanted for the video.

Storage was also a major challenge. All of our equipment had to be kept in the tiny entryway and in the building hallway. The couch that normally sits in the living room was moved into the hallway, while the bed was pushed against the kitchen wall.

It was definitely chaotic, but also a lot of fun.

Some of the practical setups sound almost deliberately punishing. What was the most difficult sequence to pull off?

For the bathtub scene, we filled the tub with tomato sauce to emulate alphabet soup. As you can imagine, it was incredibly smelly and quite gross. Several team members were gagging, but Jazzelle still completely committed and gave a killer performance in that bowl of girl soup.

For the dental-office sequence, Avvi adhered latex to the yellow walls to create grungy, heavily textured surfaces with a lot of character.

We had very little time to complete the production design. The apartment bedroom had previously been covered in graffiti for our Poor Choices video, so the team had to repaint it and apply the latex the night before the shoot.

Because of that, there were still fumes in the room when we started filming. It was hot, stuffy, and intense. Robot was dressed in a full latex suit, and we wrapped Jazzelle to the dental chair in plastic film.

I think those challenges speak for themselves, honestly. Despite everything, Robot and Jazzelle still gave everything to the performances. Robot even took it as far as chewing on the latex walls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w0FhEDGdMc

The opening makes a very direct visual reference to A Clockwork Orange. What interested you about revisiting that image?

I’m honestly very proud of the entire video because it was a real feat, made possible only by all the incredible minds that came together to turn the idea into reality.

It was especially exciting to experiment with visual effects and 3D Gaussian-splat scans for the introduction and outro. That was a technique I had been wanting to explore for some time.

The opening is a direct homage to the Korova Milkbar scene in A Clockwork Orange, which was a very formative film for me.

It was deeply satisfying to turn that iconic image on its head by creating a hyper-pink mirrored room filled with mostly naked men in tutus, functioning as tables.

There is a strong sense of excess in the video, but it never feels visually random. How do you balance spontaneity with control?

A large part of that balance comes from trust.

The performers are incredibly intuitive, and because we already had a creative relationship with Skuzland, there was room for improvisation without losing the visual structure of the piece.

Carl and I usually begin with very clear visual intentions, but we also try to leave enough space for something unexpected to happen. In this case, the unexpected moments often became the most alive and memorable parts of the video.

The visual world needed to feel highly constructed, but the people within it could never feel over-controlled. That contradiction was very important.

Your path into filmmaking began through photography and writing. When did cinema become the place where those interests came together?

My background was in photography and creative writing.

Soon after moving to New York and beginning at Pratt Institute, I met my current partner, Carl Knight, who was studying film at SVA. We immediately started collaborating and creating work together.

I quickly realized that filmmaking is, in many ways, a brilliant combination of writing and photography. Once I began making films, I never looked back.

After graduating, Carl and I launched our production company, Clam Studios. It is a full-service film, video, and photography production house based in Brooklyn, New York.

Together, we handle projects from the earliest creative development in pre-production through to final mastered delivery. Most of our current work exists in fashion campaigns, music videos, commercial work, and branded content.

Has directing FREAK is WILD influenced the kind of work you want to make next?

My debut narrative short film is currently in the early stages of pre-production, and I’m very excited about it.

I’m also hoping to create more fashion films in the latter half of this year.

The experience of making FREAK is WILD reinforced how much I enjoy work that allows for strong visual world-building and emotional freedom. I want to continue developing that language, but within more narrative structures as well.

The video screened at SXSW London. What did that experience mean to you?

Film festivals are a crucial resource for filmmakers. The community growth, support, and exposure to new films are unbeatable.

At SXSW London this past June, I made new filmmaker friends who I’m confident will now be friends for life.

I loved all of the new films—both shorts and features—that I had the pleasure of experiencing throughout that wonderful week. Being surrounded by so many filmmakers and so much talent was pure joy.

It was an incredibly inspiring experience and really pushed me to commit more fully to my narrative journey.

What advice would you give filmmakers deciding where to submit their work?

Take your time finding the festivals whose programming genuinely speaks to you.

Those are the ones worth your time.

Your answer about the future of film is strikingly concise: “More inclusive and bold.” What does that mean to you in practice?

It means creating space for work that doesn’t apologize for its identity, its queerness, its visual extremity, or its difference.

It means a wider range of voices being given the resources and trust to create work on their own terms.

And it means allowing cinema to become stranger, braver, and less restricted by what has traditionally been considered acceptable or marketable.

Which filmmaker has had the strongest impact on your own artistic sensibility?

Todd Haynes.

His work affects me in an indescribable, life-altering way. Even listening to the soundtracks from his films gives me shivers in the best possible way.

The ways in which he explores queer relationships, humanity, and romance are incredibly inspiring to me.

Is there a recent film that stayed with you?

En el Camino, or On the Road in English, directed by David Pablos.

I had the pleasure of seeing it at SXSW London, and it is now officially one of my favorite films of all time.

The film is raw, striking, and touching in a way I had never experienced before. It is excellent filmmaking in every sense.

Final Cut: Why FREAK is WILD Matters

Watching FREAK is WILD, I was reminded that independent cinema often finds its most vital form when it stops asking permission to be tasteful.

Annika White’s video is excessive, tactile, erotic, funny, uncomfortable, and meticulously designed. It embraces camp without reducing it to irony and queerness without translating it for a presumed outside audience. Its world exists confidently on its own terms.

What makes the piece especially relevant within the spectrum of independent cinema is the way it collapses categories. It is a music video, but also a fashion film, a performance work, a VFX experiment, and a compact piece of queer surrealism. It belongs to a generation of moving-image artists for whom the boundaries between commercial form and personal expression are increasingly porous.

I also find its use of limitation deeply important. The video creates abundance inside a cramped apartment. It turns practical discomfort, improvised spaces, tomato sauce, latex, mirrors, and bodies into a coherent cinematic universe. That is one of independent filmmaking’s oldest strengths: not hiding constraint, but metabolizing it into style.

At a moment when so many images are engineered to become smooth, frictionless, and instantly consumable, FREAK is WILD insists on texture. It is sticky, sweaty, synthetic, and alive. It reminds me that cinema does not always need to behave beautifully in order to be beautiful.

Sometimes it needs to chew the walls.