Belden’s Customer Innovation Gateway
Belden builds the networking and cable infrastructure behind industrial operations. Its new Customer Innovation Gateway in St. Louis was designed to show customers what that technology looks like in practice, and the company needed the entire floor documented before opening. One production day covered both: the architecture in daylight, the experience center in the dark, and cinematic video alongside the stills.
Photo and video in one production day: one visit, one schedule, one round of access and room coordination.
Stills and motion, produced together.
The film was shot alongside the photography rather than as a separate production. The same rooms, employees and screen content were captured in motion without another day of access, scheduling and disruption on a floor where people have jobs to do.
It opens in daylight.
The fifteenth floor is white, wood and glass. It is the easier half of the space to photograph, but it still has to work as a brand library. The brand wall is the first thing a visitor sees and the first thing a recruiter puts on a careers page.
Then you step into a room with no daylight at all.
Twelve hundred square feet lit almost entirely by screens, with a moss wall, an LED video wall and an interactive table competing for the same air. Rooms like this are difficult because the only light in them is moving and colored, and a camera set for the screen loses the room while a camera set for the room blows out the screen. The content on the wall was changed live during the session, so the frames cycle through what the wall can actually do instead of repeating one holding slide.
Close enough to read.
An experience center is only interesting if you can see what it does. The detail frames hold the touch table legible, down to the product categories on the screen, so the images work in a sales deck and not only on a wall.
The part you cannot photograph from outside.
One end of the center is a room you step into wearing a headset, which leaves a photographer with a problem: the experience is invisible and the only evidence of it is a face. So these frames are about reaction. A headset covers the eyes, so everything has to be carried by a mouth and a pair of hands, which is a harder portrait than it sounds.
A room like this reads differently with someone in it.
Scale is hard to photograph empty, and a screen wall means nothing until somebody is standing in front of it. These are composed so the room stays the subject and the people in it read as people at work rather than as models placed for the camera.
Shot the same day, on the same floor.
The footage is also a source of stills. These frames were pulled straight from the delivered film, and 39 of the 129 delivered stills are frames from the footage.
And back out to the floor people actually work on.
The rest of the day covered the rooms the company books: a boardroom under a domed skylight, meeting rooms looking out over the city, a huddle room with a planted ceiling, the break room. This is the half of a workplace library that gets used for recruiting long after a launch is over, which is why it is worth shooting on the same day rather than scheduling twice.
Next case study: WSC Recycles in Bridgeton.
Whits Services Corporation handles hard-to-recycle materials for national accounts from its facility in Bridgeton, just outside St. Louis. The full write-up is on the way. These are a first look.
A space documented in stills and motion, in one day.
Everything here was shot in working rooms with available and supplemental light, no set build and no closure of the floor, across one day that also produced the video. The people in these frames are Belden employees who volunteered a few minutes between meetings rather than hired models, which is usually the difference between a workplace library that gets used and one that looks bought. If you need a facility documented in stills and motion without turning it into a production set for two days, this is the work I do.
Related work and services
A corporate floor and the screen-lit experience center inside it, photographed and filmed in a single production day before the space opened.