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A SPECIAL F/X BOUTIQUE PUTS ITS FAITH IN THE PAST, EVEN AS IT RIDES A REVOLUTION INTO THE FUTURE Not many people look to the designer of the Hoover vacuum cleaner for inspiration, but at Belief, a Santa Monica-based broadcast design studio, the great Henry Dreyfuss is something of an icon. "Dreyfuss spent his life designing telephones and typewriters because that way his work touched everyone," explains Belief partner Steve Kazanjian. "Broadcast design is similar. Millions of people see what you create even if they're not aware of it."It's ironic that Kazanjian and partner Mike Goedecke have such an interest in design history, because their firm is riding a wave of revolution in their field. With a rack of Macintosh computers, a copy of AfterEffects, and a dizzying number of plugins, Belief has built a punk-kid business into a force that has stripped clients away from studios many times its size and resources.
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Every kid now with an iMac and a copy of AfterEffects can learn the basics of motion graphics design.
- Steve Kazanjian
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The pair began their little joyride five years ago. Kazanjian, a business school refugee and a former art director at Showtime, had a burgeoning freelance business. Goedecke, fresh out of stint on Voyager's Criterion project, had been a film student at USC, and was also toiling in the freelance salt mines. "We'd both come to the conclusion that the desktop computer was going to revolutionize broadcast design," says Kazanjian. Introduced through a friend, they met for nachos and beer at the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard. By the time the table was cleared, Belief was born.
In the post-nacho era, Belief experienced rapid growth. Their first hire was sound designer Scott Lang, and they've since packed their warehouse with nearly twenty people - along with every old cathode ray tube, vacuum cleaner, and Selectric they can lay their hands on. (Yes, Goedecke and Kazanjian's fanatical interest in design history has turned their workspace into something of a museum.) Their clients come from a wide swath of television shows and studios including USA Networks, The Food Network, Universal Pictures, The WB Cable Network, The Disney Channel, and the Grammy Awards.
Not surprisingly, Belief rarely looks to contemporary broadcast designers for inspiration. "We draw a lot on fine artists," says Goedecke. "We got the idea for our Grammy work, for example, from a gold-leaf painting by Gustav Klimt that we saw in San Francisco."
According to their mantra, broadcast design is becoming a new kind of storytelling, much like film titling. And they expect a huge upsurge of talent in the industry. "Every kid now with an iMac and a copy of AfterEffects can learn the basics of motion graphics design," says Kazanjian. "That opens up the field to a huge talent pool that may never have gotten the chance to work on the million-dollar systems we had before."
That means that a new world is coming, one that Belief hopes to influence and shape, while keeping, of course, a firm handle on the past. The latest arrivals at Belief, according to Goedecke, are Star Trek (as a client) and a fully-functional, hand-cranked Victrola. The trick is trying to guess which one they're more excited about.
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