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Río de Janeiro motion and music branding studio, Beeld Motion stands out for its solid attitude when approaching projects, but is also not afraid to restrict itself to a local market, and reject requests and pitches.
“We don’t want our clients to get us wrong, but we don’t believe in the creative process [of a pitch],” says Eduardo Tosto, partner and creative director at Beeld Motion. “For us, the most interesting projects are those in which visuals play a significant role, serving something higher and more relevant. It’s impossible for us to pursue projects based on pitches.”
Beeld Motion was born out of the interest of Eduardo Mourão, on-air marketing manager at Brazil’s premium channel group Rede Telecine, in finding design artists to include as collaborators in his portfolio.
“I wanted to get to know their process and quality of work, while giving them the opportunity to appear [in the market],” says Mourão.
He compiled a list of 42 professionals, and selected those he considered to be the top five to work with him on the 2010 rebrand of Telecine, which included six on-air projects. The designers were Eduardo Tosto, Marcelo Mourão, Greco Bernardi, Papito Jones and Luiz Maggessi.
“I asked them to rent a space within Telecine’s headquarters,” he said. “There was a certain resistance at the beginning. They were freelance professionals who wanted to work from home, each in their own environment, connecting through Skype.”
Yet, he convinced them, and this was the beginning of Beeld Motion. The five went on to create the studio under a logo made up of of five dots, which remained in place even after Maggessi left the studio.
The logo design is reminiscent of a game, in which the dots are easily interchangeable.
“It represents our approach of several people with different experiences working together, and we interchange our roles depending on each project. We don’t like having fixed duties,” says Tosto.
In turn, the pronunciation of Beeld—Dutch for image— conjures the verb “build,” implying that the studio was still in development at the moment of its creation. To craft the name, they looked up the word “image” in Google Translator, and found what they considered to be the most original translation.
Experimenting with Rede Telecine
The studio kicked off with Rede Telecine as its first client. As part of a promo campaign Vá ao cinema (Go to the cinema), Beeld Motion created the short film O homem que nunca tinha ido ao cinema (The Man who had never been to the Cinema), about a man who’s afraid of dark movie theaters.
“The objective was to move channel subscribers and movie lovers, reminding them that without a movie theatre, Telecine would never exist,” Mourão says. “The main idea was to tell the story in five fragments, one for each artist, giving them freedom to make their own signature work. The result was magical.”
They worked with a combination of different visual languages and animation styles.
“It was our most experimental work, and it shows one of the main pillars of the studio: storytelling,” says Tosto.
Also for Rede Telecine, Beeld Motion created a graphic package for Moviebox, a show dedicated to news and interviews of the movie industry for the channel Megapix. The piece is organized into short scenes that represent different film genres, with a casual look inspired by handmade crafts.
“We used a stop motion style to recreate the idea of TV show that goes behind the scenes,” says Tosto.
Expanding Its Projects
Another important project is the spot for Fox Sports’ campaign Sinta-se lá (Feel yourself there) for the 2014 World Cup. The work was developed jointly with advertising agency FIC Latam Creative Team, which presented the idea and gave Beeld Motion creative freedom.
“When we start from a good idea, projects are very easy to develop,” says Tosto. “This is a good example of how a good idea can be turned into a good piece.”
The 3D CGI promo starts with a close up of peoples’ shoes, standing inside a stadium. A sequence shot follows the very long legs of an unknown character along a journey from the stadium, to his living room—along the way showing the euphoria of fans in the streets rooting for their national team, and Fox reporters covering the event. The legs eventually lead to an apartment where the character is sitting on his sofa, watching the game on TV and enjoying it as if he was there—Sinta-se lá; feeling he is there.
Another client-presented project was a 2015 spot for the third season of Bates Motel for Universal Channel Brazil.
To capture the twisted origins of serial killer Norman Bates, the piece shows a series of framed photos on a wall that are connected by an animated stream of blood that forms a chilling family tree.
Another significant spot was for Rede Globo’s series Meu Pedacinho of Chão (My Little Piece of Earth), which Beeld Motion created alongside CGCOM - Videographics. Inspired by the openings of Japanese cartoons, the colorful piece introduces the main characters in the story—such as Miss Juliana (Bruna Linzmeyer) characterized by her parasol, and Colonel Epaminondas (Osmar Prado), recognized his authoritarian posture.
Beeld Motion also developed the visual identity for Discovery Kids Brazil’s programming segment Super Máquinas (Super Machines), in which each of the letters in the title represents a different robot. The machines race against each other until turning into letters and forming the show’s logo.
“Super Máquinas includes several shows. Speed was the only common feature in all of them,” says Victor H. Seabra, who was services director at Discovery Brazil at the time of the project, and is now creative manager at Globosat. “We had the idea of playing with the letters but we did not know exactly how. “Beeld gave life and personality to each letter, placing them in a cinematographic action scene.”
“We tried to reproduce cartoon dynamics, in which each team member has a specific power,” says Tosto.
The rebrand for Globosat’s SporTV channel is one of Beeld Motion’s most recent projects. The studio developed a simple and flexible design system, organized by content, that emphasized sports-related elements such as shields, flags and idols.
“SporTV has a large design department with different daily challenges, so they needed something really easy to handle. Instead of offering [fixed] solutions, we delivered a flexible system with which they could play,” says Tosto.
Moving Towards Original Content
For now, Beeld Motion is interested in moving its portfolio forward by generating original content, with the idea for a cartoon series targeted at kids underway.
But it’s not in any rush to grow.
“We like to be small and to forge lasting relations with our clients. We like to find clients who respect our way of work and understand our production times,” says Tosto. “It is not that we are scared of foreign clients; we simply haven’t had time to look for them.”
Version español: Creative Review: Beeld Motion