Time and scheduling become major players in a docu-follow sports series about high-profile athletes with heavy time demands and constraints. These 100 days of production were a physical and mental training ground for all aspects of our production team. While working against time and access restrictions, our team had to build immense trust with the players, their families, agents, and managers. We captured these men in one of the most pivotal, interesting moments of their stories – each one of these players has been a part of a team since they were children, and this is the only three month period in their life in which that won’t be the case. It was crucial for us to be in the right moment at the right time to capture these compelling pieces of their journey, because if we don’t have those moments, we don’t have a great show.
To combat this challenge, we created one of the most rigorous production schedules with crews staggered in a Tetris-like fashion to put themselves in the best possible position for capturing compelling content. This level of elaborate planning and project management spanned across all aspects of production and into post production. Because episodes delivered as the story unfolded in real time, our rapid post production plan called for footage ingest and assembly immediately after each shoot – allowing us to deliver the final episode only 5 days after the NFL Draft.
The nature of this project, and of sports documentaries in general, required great hustle, attention to detail, and flexibility from all parts of the team, reflecting the incredible work ethic and mental perserverance shared by the entire team.