Freelancing is brilliant and brutal. Anyone who's ever done it knows. The work shows up at midnight, the brief is half a paragraph, the invoice waits six weeks, and the credit goes to the agency that subcontracted you.

Five Six runs a different way. Always has.

Every freelancer we work with - a photographer in Leeds, a developer in Manchester, an animator in Cyprus - gets the same three things: a brief that actually tells them what we need, payment within fourteen days of an invoice, and a credit when their work goes public. No 47-page contracts. No "exposure" instead of money. No agency wrapper that makes their work look like ours.

This isn't generosity. It's just how creative work should function. The best people choose who they work with, and they don't keep choosing the studios that mess them about. If you're a freelancer reading this and we've worked together, you know we mean it. If we ever haven't, tell us - that's the kind of thing we want to know about immediately.

The freelance economy is the spine of the creative industry. We'd quite like it not to break.