Sometimes, it’s not what’s in a name, but in what’s left out, and in the case of Breathe Editing – now known as ThinkBreatheLive – quite a bit was missing.
“When we opened 10 years ago, our messaging was all about offline editing, and even though we still sometimes did some production or helped out the music guys or worked with the writers and creatives to set the right tone for a spot, we never really told the wider world about what we were doing,” stated ThinkBreatheLive (TBL) EP Kenny Pedini. “Each year, our capabilities have grown across the production spectrum, but we were still officially just an edit house.”
So the studio set out to officially rebrand itself to better represent its full range of capabilities to an ever-changing advertising landscape. The rethinking process began four years ago, when a meeting with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters changed the company’s trajectory completely. The veteran rocker, impressed with Breathe’s work on his Dark Side of the Moon tour, encouraged the company to fully transform itself into a hybrid studio capable of creative direction, content creation, execution, editorial, design, animation and supervision. Soon, the studio had its own graphics teams and designers and was setting up production shoots all over the world.
“We have a very talented crew that has a passion for every stage of the filmmaking process, from casting to shooting to cutting,” said ThinkBreatheLive Editor Michael Schwartz. “Editors are by their very definition problem solvers, and so anytime a shoot hits a snag, we’re the ones that often propose ways to rethink the shoot. But it’s hard for a studio that says it’s an editing company to turn the next second and say they offer production services, so we never offered it as a service, though we would do it when asked. So the next natural step was to find the best way to communicate our breadth of services to the broader production community.”
A brainstorming session six months ago led to the new ThinkBreatheLive moniker, a hybrid name with distinct meaning for each piece. “Think” represents the company’s graphics capabilities; “Breathe” represents Breathe editing; and “Live” represents the studio’s production arm. “We’ve always done graphics and we’ve always done live action, but we couldn’t sit there and call ourselves ‘Breathe Editing Graphics’ or ‘Breathe Editing Production,'” stated Pedini. “The infrastructure and the talent were already in place to do these things – it was just a matter of coming up with a name that was true to ourselves, and thus, ‘ThinkBreatheLive.'”
The studio is announcing its new name to the world with a spot on its overhauled website, www.ThinkBreatheLive.com – which, in addition to vital info about the company and its services, offers a pastel-colored world full of surprises and video-game-esque playing elements.
About ThinkBreatheLive
From an unassuming film editing studio launched by a trio of ad community veterans in a three-room warehouse in 2001, Breathe has evolved into ThinkBreatheLive — an innovative hybrid, capable of creative direction, content creation, execution, editorial, design, animation and supervision, all set amid a rambling space that is stocked with musical instruments and often hosts jam sessions and sushi parties. Special projects – including video screen content for a live Beyonce performance at the Billboard Music Awards and Roger Waters’ Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall tours – highlight ThinkBreatheLive‘s portfolio, which also includes efforts for leading advertising agencies BBDO, Merkley, MRM, Draftfcb, Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey Worldwide, Della Femina, Wishbone and Arnold NY; collaborations with talent from a variety of industries, including Petra Nemkova, Michael Imperioli and Dave Brubeck; documentaries about Miles Davis, James Brown, the Apollo Theater and Happy Hearts Fund; and PSAs on anti-smoking, gun control, tolerance and drug abuse. www.ThinkBreatheLive.com
