Mike Goedecke

Competition is good.

Lets push the cinema boundaries,
it can only make the final products better and better.

Now if hollywood could actual have some ideas worth telling we would all be better off.

Thank you so much for posting this, it looks like an amazing product.

Thanks for the very kind words.

I've always thought belief will come back, but in some mutated form that is more appropriate for the time.

I did many crazy things near the end to stay inspired and presented many ideas to the artists that were radical - but seemed to fall on deaf ears for the most part.

I realized belief was not in the design business at all, but actually in the REAL ESTATE business. Most of the money that came into the company went to BUILDING RENT for the office and to salaries for the employees. Most of the salaries went to RENT, most designers living by themselves in over priced apartments. So really Belief was a real estate company, funneling money from clients to properties around santa monica and los angeles.

I researched heavily and proposed starting a true artist compound, based on low cost cargo container home construction. RADICAL I know, but I was at my wits end. I wanted to find a new business model, a place where artists could live rent free, allow for visiting artists and then do communal lunches with great food, perhaps grown in our own garden. There was really very little point to be in LA other then the talent pool, but belief was 95% staff, very few freelancers. Working late every night, gave you little time to have a "life" Wake up go to work - work - come home - sleep - repeat. If everyone is living rent free, there could be time and budgets allocated for true independent work that could be owned by the compound and the artists and pay for the infrastructure to continue the idea. It could be set up 100% non profit so all money is sunk back into funding projects in some sort of grant system.

Given the fact many of the designers surfed, I looked seriously into Hawaii. They had at the time a massive post production tax write off, so starting it would almost be free in terms of new equipment. Met with many of the top cargo container architects as well. I had friends lined up who would be the "farmers" for the compound.

I know what you are thinking - mike - you are F#$% crazy.

But I still have this dream of such a place and I do think its possible and would provide a better way of life for the talent involved and actually allow people to save money and free up time for personal work.

Belief tried to do experimental work with the untitled project - but it was hard to maintain for various financial reasons. Closing the entire office down for 2 weeks is a 250K nut that someone has to pay, on top of shuffling jobs around to not upset any clients. I figure I spent at least a million dollars over the years allowing the artist time and resources to create experimental work.

We all learned from it and now at least we have things like pollinate to look back on that were created in this structure.

Keep up the struggle, or try to find the next business model.

This churn and burn industry can only survive for so long before it will implode like so many others. Whats the word people pass around these days, its not SUSTAINABLE.

That very much sums it up!