LABOR XII Breathe: A Journey in Authenticity
Some of you may know, others may not, but Ross and Jacob with Hamil Bros Studios go way beyond creating high quality video production content and are both musicians, having music that has reached an audience globally.
The band is called LABOR XII and their newest single is titled “Breathe”, and this song is already poised as a favorite off of their sophomore album, Gunpowder and Death.
Due to a mishap with the distribution of the song, the LABOR XII Breathe music video was released before the actual song itself was released across streaming and sales platforms.
This may have actually been advantageous to a degree because it forced listeners of the song to watch the video, which was important to the band, and extremely important to Ross because the message of the song is extraordinarily powerful: you can’t do anything to take away someone’s grief.
You Can't Hide from the Truth
The Story Behind the Song and Music Video
When Hamil Bros Studios does a music video production for LABOR XII, sometimes it’s strictly performance, sometimes there’s narrative story.
This particular video was narrative driven with a very literal meaning.
The Breathe music video, starring Jonathan Hamil (Ross’ son), is the story of repeated loss for Jonathan.
This song was the first song written for this album, and it was written for Ross’ children in early spring of 2023.
The story starts in 2016 with the tragic loss of Ross and Jacob’s maternal grandmother, whom we all lovingly called Honey.
Honey was in a car accident in January of 2016 that ended up taking her from us within a few days. After having been unconscious for days and brain activity ceasing, she was taken off life support.
That night, Ross took his family to the hospitals to say their goodbyes.
For the first time since she was put on a ventilator, she was aware. She tapped her bed for Jonathan to sit with her, placed her hand on his chest and mouthed the words, “I love you.”
The next morning, she was gone.
This was Jonathan’s first real brush with death.
Over the next 7 years, the kids would lose 3 more great grandparents and their family dog who had been with them for nearly Jonathan’s entire life.
Now, you have to understand that the great grandparents were very close family members.
We didn’t grow up being incredibly close to all of our great grandparents, but Ross’ children did.
To make things more challenging, Ross’ children were with the subsequent three great grandparents as they took their final breaths.
Most people never experience death that closely, excepting pets.
These kids were there for three.
In 2023, the last of these great grandparents, Ross’ wife’s maternal grandfather, was in his last days. His wife had passed 4 years before and it had been a tough decline.
With the strain he knew was going to be on the family through yet another loss, Ross, feeling completely helpless as a father and a husband, wrote the lyrics to Breathe.
The song is literally a lamentation; watching his children lose portions of their innocence to death and the destruction it brings.
When it came time to begin the process of releasing Breathe, Ross had an idea, and it was a hill he was willing to die on.
The narrative part of the music video would follow Jonathan, struggling to maintain his emotions as he gets dressed, takes a car ride, and ultimately ends up at the gravesite of his first lost great grandmother, Honey.
Shooting the Music Video
Snow Day
In January 2026, we got a snowstorm, unlike we had seen in several years in West Texas. If you are familiar with Lubbock, you know that we don’t get a lot of snow, but when we do, it’s big.
Since Ross had pitched the idea to Jacob of using Jonathan in the video, Jacob thought it was a good idea and proposed trying to get footage while the snow was down.
The first thing we did for this entire video, was shooting the cemetery footage. It was an amazingly calm day. Very little wind, not a cloud in the sky, and undisturbed snow everywhere.
The concern that Jonathan may have a difficult time with this was very real.
Jonathan is not an actor, but it was important, to Ross, that Jonathan be the visual centerpiece of his own story.
It was cold, but Jonathan did an amazing job. He never complained once.
We don’t necessarily shoot things in sequence for narrative pieces, but this particular part, we were forced to. Since the snow was still virgin, we did our best to preserve it.
With this sequence, which was the last in the music video, we did not want it to be terribly obvious where Jonathan was going or what he was doing, with more clues alluding to his location towards the end of the entire cemetery part of the story.
Shooting this bit was special. Not only did we get to capture something directly related to the meaning of the song, the snow put us at the cemetery within 2 days of the 10th anniversary of the avalanche of grief that the song was written about.
Performance Day
Building the Box
Next up on the video production schedule was getting the performance segments.
Jacob and Ross had both arrived at the idea that it wouldn’t be a full band collaboration. We would get various angles of the individual members, but no one would be together.
Jacob had had the idea of shooting the performances on a white cyclorama (an infinite white background), but those aren’t the easiest to come by. Additionally, he had the idea of everyone being in white outfits. White on white. An interesting choice that turned out to be exactly what the music video needed.
Fortunately, Hamil Bros Studios has an infinite white paper roll that’s approximately 40’ long.
Using some good, old fashioned, Southern ingenuity, Jacob built the set that would hold the paper background.
Using several stands, clamps, and grip gear, we were able to get the paper up, creating what looked like a large scale photo box.
Next, we needed to light the box.
Jacob had built our Aputure 1200d onto one of our Matthews Combo Stands and got it flown high enough to shoot into the top of the white box.
He also built our 8×8’ fabric frame for the diffusion. Initially, he put our Matthews Voodoo Cloth on it, but that proved to lower the light values too much for what we needed.
We, instead, opted for an 8×8 silk that we had on hand. This was perfect.
Finally, he rigged a couple of Amaran 150C lights for the back lights.
The final touch was to get the white floor.
We were literally shooting in a workshop with a concrete floor and needed to match the white of the walls.
For this, Jacob purchased some plain white bed sheets and we covered the box floor with them.
A completely DIY white room was built and all it cost was the price of some cheap white sheets. Not bad.
Shooting for Slow Motion
There’s not often a Hamil Bros Studios video production that doesn’t include some sort of slow motion.
Something we had seen since we were young and first getting into watching music videos was the use of slow motion in performance pieces.
After some testing, we decided to go time and a half on the speed for the performance part.
We wanted to go twice the speed, but that wasn’t going to happen… Tooooo fast.
It’s hard to tell that we shot in slow motion because everyone performed so well, but it gives a hint of the floating feeling while the band members were performing.
After hearing the song at a normal speed for so long, hearing it faster really messes with your brain.
Fortunately, this was a hurdle that was quickly overcome and the music video performance was under way.
We started with our drummer Jeremy. After two or three takes, Ross had the idea of getting some super slow motion bits that would be 5 times slower than real time (meaning a shot that takes one second to shoot will play back over 5 seconds).
When this idea was pitched, Jeremy decided to do some trickery on the drums.
He wanted to hit a drum, throw his stick in the air, catch it, and bring it down crashing.
This took several takes, but, boy, did it turn out great.
This meant that everyone was going to get their real slomo moment. Except Ross…. Nothing in his performance was action-packed enough, but that was fine.
The Last of the Story
An Empty Room Full of Sadness
A couple of days later, we shot the remaining parts of Jonathan’s story.
It was to start out in an empty room.
Again, timing smiled on us and we had an empty room at our disposal.
Last June (2025) there was a massive storm that came through and a double tornado and the surrounding storm ripped right through Lubbock and parts of West Texas.
Our parents lost windows in their house, the roof was toasted and there was a lot of other damage.
The windows eventually got replaced, but the last piece was getting new carpet in the section of the house where it was all soaked from the broken windows and rain.
Because of this, we had to empty out a couple of rooms completely.
Before moving furniture back in, we decided to take full advantage of the empty room and get the opening shots of Jonathan’s story.
We sat Jonathan in the doorway of the closet and, using only one light, built the set.
We placed our Aputure 80C on the floor, set it to a blue hue, and used it to emit a glow from the closet. The rest of the room was light with natural sunlight that was being choked back by faux wood window shades.
We rigged our Dana Dolly with our eMotimo motion control system, along with our Blackmagic Pyxis, d a 50mm Tokina Cinema Vista lens and got the first shot going.
A slow push on Jonathan, sitting on the floor, crying while holding a picture frame.
As this sequence moved forward, we observed Jonathan being handed some clothes, and he gets dressed.
For the last shot, we employed the Dana Dolly and eMotimo, but swapped to our Tokina Cinema 25-75mm Zoom lens.
We wanted to get a really cool dolly zoom shot, which the eMotimo allows us to do seamlessly.
We had to have Jonathan standing in the room, holding the frame, and the room shrinks around him.
Jonathan was really excited about this shot in particular.
A Drive of Tears
Later that same day, we were going to wrap production. We would be shooting the 2nd of the three scenes with Jonathan.
This was a simple concept. He was going to be in the car, riding somewhere, destination unknown.
We wanted to get some cool shots from the exterior of the car, watching Jonathan as he stared out the window, numb and, occasionally, overcome with tears.
For this, we got our Matthews Master Car Mount out and attached it to the side of the car.
This was going to be a tall order to get one of the big cameras positioned where we wanted, so we brought out our Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera, the second oldest camera we still own.
It still shoots in Blackmagic’s first generation film log (we’re now on generation 5).
Paired with one of our Veydra micro 4/3rds lenses, our Tilta mini matte box and a Tiffin polarizer filter, we were off to get the last remaining shots.
Again, Jonathan executed to perfection.
We got some reverse shots from inside the car where Ross handheld the Pyxis with the 50mm Vista lens and ended up getting some gnarly sun flares.
Once we got back to the house, we were wrapped.
At this point, Jonathan had a headache. Acting like you are grieving while actually grieving in some small part is taxing, and he had earned some rest.
Getting The Music Video Finished Quickly
Post Production
The Performance Multi-Cam
It took a little bit of time, but Ross got all of the performance clips synchronized and ready for Jacob to edit.
There were somewhere from 16 to 18 angles to edit down.
It didn’t take Jacob long to get this hammered out, sprinkling in some of the 5x slomo shots in the mix.
While Jacob worked on the edit, Ross worked on getting the color grade done on the performance.
It wasn’t terribly difficult except the performance was shot on two cameras, with two very different sensors and two different lens types.
The main camera, again, was the Blackmagic Pyxis with a Tokina Vista. The secondary camera was a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4k Camera with a Canon 24-70 photo lens, a combination that renders colors very differently from the Pyxis and Vista combo.
Once everything was balanced, the look was quickly applied and we had our performance color.
The Story
Ross had already built the cemetery shots into the music video, even before the performance was shot.
Once the rest of the story was shot, Jacob had already built the performance, and Ross quickly assembled the rest of the story into the video.
The empty room started out cold and blue. It was also very dark. It was easily the darkest thing we’ve ever put on camera, but it was perfect.
Moving onto the driving shots, it took some work to get the Micro Cinema Camera footage matched to the color of the newer cameras, but it was done with a swift urgency. The shots were selected and placed in the video.
The color palette for that section was a little warmer than the bedroom, but still muted to convey the isolated nature of the subject matter of the song and music video.
Finally, at the cemetery, the color grading was a lot more vibrant with more desaturated skin tones. This was to visually express how the world doesn’t care how you feel. You can be tormented and the sun still shines.
Sadly, nothing stops for you. Your world may stop, but time marches on.
The Impact of the Breathe Music Video
Since its initial release we have heard several stories about how this song has affected people.
Some saying that the first chorus hits and their mind was blown, others listening on repeat and sobbing.
From struggling to want to be alive to struggling with death, this song has reached many people and the music video has given a life to the song all on its own, with one person telling us it made their hair stand up.
We, at Hamil Bros Studios and on behalf of LABOR XII, can’t thank you all enough for the support for this song and this music video and hope that it has impacted you like it has impacted us.
Give Your Music the Video It Deserves
If this story resonates with you, imagine what could happen when your music is given the same level of care, creativity, and conviction.
At Hamil Bros Studios, we don’t just show up with cameras — we step into your world. As musicians ourselves, we understand that a song isn’t just audio. It’s memory. It’s meaning. It’s something you lived through. And when we approach a music video production, we treat it that way.
Whether your vision calls for a stripped-down performance piece, a cinematic narrative, or something completely outside the box, we have the experience, gear, and storytelling instinct to bring it to life with authenticity and impact.
If you’re ready to create a music video that does more than look good — one that feels honest, powerful, and unforgettable — let’s talk.
Reach out to Hamil Bros Studios today, and let’s turn your music into something people can see, feel, and never forget.