CLEVELAND: If you’ve ever seen the imaginative introductory videos shown at Cavaliers games at Quicken Loans Arena or online, you might have wondered, “Who does those?”
It’s not a big international agency out of town. It’s a Cleveland-based outfit, Think Media Studios, headed by Brian Glazen.
In addition to running a video production business with 14 full-time employees and corporate clients from Ohio and beyond, Glazen also has produced several feature films, one of which recently garnered awards at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
Fishing Without Nets, about Somali pirates, is told from the point of view of a Somali fisherman. It was the company’s first fictional movie and it won the Best Director Award.
Glazen comes across as humble about the award and focused on the notion that hard work is what brings and sustains success.
Of course, there was one lapse, Glazen admits, almost proudly.
A few years back, he explained, so much work came in as a result of the videos the company had done for the Cavs and other prominent clients that he began to lower his standards.
He was driven by a fear that he might not be able to meet the company’s substantial payroll and expenses that had grown from $6,000 a month to $100,000.
The clients might have been satisfied, but his staff of filmmakers was not.
After a period of dissatisfaction, editor-producer Keith Potoczak and the rest of the team confronted Glazen and used his own guiding principles to point out that the work was not as good as it should be. They felt it was unacceptable for Think Media.
“I was devastated, to be honest,” Glazen said. “Really. But then I thought about it and I was proud of them for standing up for their work. And maybe I was a little proud of myself for hiring such great, talented and strong-willed people.”
Glazen and his team reorganized their processes as a result.
Within a few months they were winning a succession of awards for their work — seven in all.
Although they’ve had many high-profile clients, Think Media became particularly well-known for videos for the Cavaliers.
One featured a giant LeBron James stepping out of the side of the building that formerly had a massive image of James painted on its side. Think Media picked up an Emmy for that work in 2009.
A more recent Cavs video featured iconic buildings and places in Cleveland, with their lights flashing in choreographed sequences, cut to music and images of the players in action.
“That was one of the most exciting and difficult things we’ve pulled off,” Glazen said. “And it demonstrated what a great town this is to work in.”
Glazen, along with Potoczak, had only two weeks to produce the video, so the only way to show the lights of Cleveland flashing on and off and make it look real was to actually make it happen. Because it’s an older city, there was no central location to manipulate lights.
A call was placed to Ivan Schwarz of the Cleveland Film Commission, and Schwarz helped to get the mayor’s office involved.
Valerie McCall, the chief of government for Mayor Frank Jackson, arranged for technicians to manipulate the lights on command. The team communicated by walkie-talkie and had to move from location to location with each shot, finding the right switch box and turning lights on and off.
When the crew shot on East Fourth Street, Ari Maron, the developer who transformed the neighborhood, was so supportive of the project, he installed new lights and switches at his own expense to make the shot work.
Glazen, who lived in Los Angeles for several years, said he is thrilled to have moved back to Northeast Ohio and committed to building the production business here.
“You couldn’t get that kind of support in New York or L.A., but here you can make things happen and you can make them happen quickly,” he said. “That’s why I love this town.”
Think Media’s clients have included Summa Health Systems, Progressive Insurance, GOJO, Nestle and Smucker, as well as various universities and institutions.
For more information about the company, go to http://thinkmediastudios.com.
Daryl Rowland can be reached at darylvrowland@gmail.com.