The most unforgiving minutes in television programming fall between the actual programs. There, in the program breaks, networks and their advertisers work furiously to lock our attention, even as we contemplate riding our remotes to one of several hundred competing points of moving light in our cable or satellite mediaverse.

Viewer traction has never been less secure. But it’s precisely in these friction-free niches that Belief, a sure-footed broadcast design and live-action studio in Santa Monica, CA, has flourished, riveting fast-twitch viewers with quick-cut, high-def promos and commercials created for clients like ABC, Bud Light, Food Network, HBO, NBC, Sony Entertainment TV and Discovery Networks.

“Things need to be dazzling, for sure, but at the end of the day, it’s sort of easy to make stuff look cool. What’s hard is to create something that in five years still really resonates.”

Plugged-in Analog

How does a small company (16 employees) thrive in a treacherous market space among outsized competitors wielding ever-bigger special effects? Clues can be found in every corner of its studio, a quiet grey stucco building (Zen garden, lava rock pit, Eastern minimalist meeting room) brimming with artfully displayed and carefully archived bric-a-brac — period artifacts, eccentric props, volumes of image-dense books.

“That’s key to the way we work,” says Mike Goedecke, Belief’s founder and executive creative director. “We try to bring as much stuff in from the analog world as we can. If we acquire a weird prop, we keep it so we have it for another shoot.” Even a casual walk around the studio turns up plenty of supporting evidence, including a retro-industrial dream capture device designed by Belief for an experimental short film.

Balancing the analog frontend of Belief’s production equation is a strictly digital backend. Conspicuously integrated with the warm studio woods and props are late-model hi-def cameras, scanners and printers ready to peel pixels from any analog source. Most conspicuous — and central to Belief’s postproduction workflow — are dozens of visibly busy Apple Cinema Displays attached to Power Mac G5 editing stations running Final Cut Pro.

This potent hitching of widgets to digits — exquisitely shot HD objects, heavily composited and fluidly cut — helps Belief generate spots that look at once thoroughly familiar and completely strange: high-efficiency attention traps for fugitive eyeballs.

Design Logic

Although transfixing fickle viewers motivates Belief’s clients, Goedecke insists that his designers bring more than flash to concept meetings. “Things need to be dazzling, for sure, but at the end of the day, it’s sort of easy to make stuff look cool.” he says. “What’s hard is to create something that in five years still really resonates.”

To ensure that its promos manage to both hit and hold its targets, Belief builds out each spot from design logic derived from exhaustive demographic research and tightly-focused creative briefs. “For everything in our designs, there’s a reason, a point, a logic that relates to that client and that moment,” Goedecke says.

That logic serves as a creative compass as Belief’s projects move from roughs through final concept. “I always have the designers come up with a story for what they’re doing,” says Goedecke. “As the design evolves it tells us whether things are going right or wrong. If an Apple falls up on planet Earth, that’s not right. On the moon or some other planet, that’s maybe OK. But then every element needs to be falling up.”

Goedecke’s favorite test for whether a design succeeds is a simple thought-experiment: “If you put a different logo on the promo, does it still work? If the promo is still relevant, we clearly haven’t done our job.”

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