Defy Impossible: Docuseries Case Study
In the summer of 2025, just as creative editorial on Frankenstein was spinning up, our friends at Weekend Video reached out with a fun opportunity. They were gearing up to produce a new docuseries that captured the blood, sweat, and triumphs of the athletes at Dallas-based Adaptive Training Foundation - ATF.
Founded by retired NFL linebacker David Vobora, ATF is a powerhouse organization that bridges the gap between functional rehabilitation and adaptive sport. They empower wounded veterans and civilians with life-altering injuries to redefine their physical and mental limits. It’s heavy, inspiring stuff.
The Goal
Originally called All In, we needed to make sense of a 10-week production shooting with a minimum of 3 cameras across full days, plus production sound. The kicker was that though budget was available, it was tight. They needed a Hollywood-level workflow on an indie budget. A workflow managed by a single Assistant Editor.
Challenge accepted.
The Workflow Problem: Volume vs. Bandwidth
Post-production for documentary filmmaking is essentially the art of managing chaos. With a production crew led by director Ryan Wermich and EP Grant Wakefield filming non-stop for 10 weeks, we were looking at a tidal wave of footage - over 30TB of media by the finish line.
.webp)
The challenge wasn't just storing the data; it was making it usable. Managing that volume of media usually requires a dedicated team of AEs to ingest, sync, organize, and log, not just a lone Assistant Editor.
The production needed a system that allowed a single person to process terabytes of multi-cam footage weekly without bottlenecks, ensuring that when offline editorial started, the post team could hit the ground running.
The Tools We Have
At Sawtooth, we don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to post-production; we utilize the right tools for each job. Case and point, Defy Impossible would be built as a Premiere Production while we were simultaneously editing Frankenstein’s BTS – another 30TB+ monster (literally) – entirely inside DaVinci Resolve.
Using a Premiere Production was a strategic choice for the series format and Sawtooth’s team had used them with great success on previous projects, like Pinocchio’s BTS and Kubota’s Product Videos.
The Production breaks a project into smaller, manageable component projects that can reference each other, allowing multiple editors to work on different episodes simultaneously.
The Game Plan
- Interviews: Isolate by name based on the week(s) they were shot.
- On-the-Fly (OTF) Interviews: Distinctly labeled per person, per day, and location.
- Sync Maps: All footage dropped by day into synced timelines for easy multi-cam reference.
The Tools We Build
Knowing how useful logged interviews are in the edit bay is one thing; finding the time to log them while ingesting terabytes of daily footage is another. We needed a smarter way to work, so we crafted a custom logging workflow by developing a purpose-built LLM via ChatGPT.
.webp)
In short, automated interview transcripts from Premiere would be fed into our custom GPT that was trained to specifically analyze conversation structure. It would then generate a captioned SRT file of summarized topics and highlight potential key B-roll moments. Back in Premiere, the SRT was imported into the interview’s timeline.
Boom.
Instant, searchable, time-coded markers in sync with the interview footage, turning a mountain of dialogue into a navigable map.
The 3-Day Sprint
After 10 weeks, the production wrapped with over 30TB of ingested media organized and ready for editorial. But as things go in this industry, the "hurry up and wait" quickly turned into just "hurry up."
To help secure investors and distribution partners, the production needed a teaser. Fast. Sawtooth was again tapped to cut a 1.5-minute trailer that captured the raw emotion and intensity of the series – and we had exactly 3 days to do it.
.webp)
This is where the custom workflow paid its dividends. Because every interview was logged and timelines were sync’d, finding the narrative thread wasn't a complete needle-in-a-haystack search. Between the logged project and a clever use of Notebook LM for context aware interview searching, we were able to quickly script, lay in music, and start b-rolling.
The Result
The "Defy Impossible" teaser was delivered fast and packed the emotional punch needed to peak interest. What could have been a chaotic scramble was a focused creative sprint, made possible only because we respected the process from day one and built a workflow that punched way above its weight.
Ready to tame your own mountain of media? Let's build a workflow that works for you.
