In a nutshell
- Always create multiple backups, including project timelines, to avoid losing critical work during unexpected technical failures.
- Stay calm and persistent when disaster strikes; creative problem-solving can salvage even dire situations.
- In filmmaking, adaptability and resourcefulness are essential for overcoming challenges and achieving success.
Do you want to know what a documentarian’s worst nightmare is? It’s not Freddy Krueger, global inflation or even the current state of the documentary marketplace. It’s losing your completed documentary film in post-production just days before your world premiere. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a nightmare for me — it was reality.
Here, I’m going to share the story of my all-too-real nightmare as a documentary filmmaker. It happened during one of the most critical times in my career, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. However, by sharing how I overcame my worst nightmare, I hope to help you find success if you ever face a similar situation.
As an indie filmmaker, you wear many hats: producer, director, camera operator, audio recorder, editor and even PR spokesperson. No job is off-limits when producing an indie film. Most of the time, if you’re wearing multiple hats on a project, there’s a high probability you’re also the primary editor. As an editor of a documentary film, you’re the one truly shaping the whole project. Editing a feature-length documentary is stressful — it can age you by years and push your mood to the edge.
The editing process starts months, even years, after financing, planning and shooting. It begins with gathering assets on an external hard drive, creating a backup and importing everything into your editing software. But no matter how prepared you are, things can still go wrong when you’re juggling so many jobs.
In 2018, we began production on our fourth feature documentary, “Warrior Spirit” (2021), which originally set out to document Nicco Montaño, the first Native American UFC champion, as she prepared to defend her 125-pound championship belt against future Hall of Famer Valentina Shevchenko. Primary production took six months and spanned locations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Lukachukai, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Dallas, Texas, where the championship fight was set to take place.
Everything was going great — until the week before the fight.
A bad beginning
During Fight Week — the days leading up to the UFC event — our protagonist, Nicco Montaño, arrived in Dallas after months of intense training and dieting. However, our story took an unexpected turn. What began as a journey following the first Native American UFC champion quickly became a cautionary tale about the dangers of extreme weight cutting in the UFC.
On the night before the official weigh-ins, Montaño faced a critical challenge. To make the 125-pound championship weight limit, she needed to cut nearly 25 pounds in just 24 hours. This isn’t biologically possible in most cases, nor is it safe.
The next morning, instead of stepping on the scale, Montaño was rushed to the emergency room. Her kidneys had failed due to the extreme weight cut. If not for the Dallas EMTs and paramedics called to the scene before the UFC weigh-ins, Montaño might have died from rhabdomyolysis, a condition where dehydration causes organs to shut down and leads to kidney failure.
What made the story even more gripping was that Clint Wattenberg, the UFC’s director of sports nutrition and diet, supervised her weight cut. Despite red flags from tests conducted at the UFC Performance Institute months before the fight, Wattenberg insisted Montaño could safely make the cut.
The nightmare commences
Fast forward through the pandemic lockdowns to 2021: After many months of editing and two years of production, we finally had a completed film ready to share. We patiently waited for COVID-19 restrictions to lift and for in-person film festivals to return. We applied to several festivals, and “Warrior Spirit” was accepted into DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary film festival and one of the most prestigious in the world. This was one of the biggest achievements of my decade-long documentary career.
Being selected for DOC NYC can be life-changing. Buyers and major streaming platforms like HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and Paramount+ attend, searching for the next breakout documentary. After two years of production and editing — and waiting out the pandemic — “Warrior Spirit” would finally make its world premiere.
But then, my real-life nightmare began. As we prepared to export the completed film and deliver it to the festival, our external hard drive wouldn’t open the project file.
The festival was less than a month away, and we hadn’t delivered our film yet. To make things worse, we only had days before DOC NYC’s submission deadline. If we missed it, they would exclude our film from the program.
We were on the verge of losing the biggest opportunity of our filmmaking careers. It was terrifying. I’d used LaCie rugged external hard drives for over a decade of documentary work and had never experienced anything like this. The LaCie brand was known for its durability and reliability — it was practically an industry standard. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Did you have a backup drive?” The answer is, “Yes, of course.”
We had backups of all the media assets. However, we didn’t have a backup of the final edited project timeline in Apple Final Cut Pro X.
Without that timeline, the film was unusable. We had to recover the hard drive, or we’d lose our spot in the festival. The pressure was unbearable. I felt like Nicco Montaño, trying to cut 25 pounds in less than 24 hours to make her title weight.
Finding a solution
The main issue with the hard drive was that it stopped mounting on the computer whenever we plugged it in, so we couldn’t access its contents.
I tried taking the drive to a data recovery shop, but they quoted $2,000 and said the process would take more than 30 days. That wasn’t an option—we didn’t have that kind of time or money. I reached out to other filmmakers and computer experts, but none of them had a solution.
When all hope seemed lost, I remembered an automatic backup project timeline saved on my computer. It mirrored the latest version of the project. Could the entire 94-minute documentary be saved, recovered and delivered before DOC NYC’s final deadline? Thankfully, the answer was yes — but it would take some serious troubleshooting and persistence.
The mirrored timeline had the complete edit of the project, but all the assets — video, audio and additional content — had to be reimported and reconnected in the backup timeline for the project to function. It was an exhausting process, but not nearly as exhausting or heartbreaking as the alternative.
A happy ending
After a few days of troubleshooting and reconnecting everything in the backup timeline, we saved our project and successfully delivered it to DOC NYC. It had its world premiere in New York City on Nov. 13, 2021. “Warrior Spirit” has since achieved amazing success, with both the CBC and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian licensing the film. “The film”Warrior Spirit” also won multiple film festival awards on top of its critical acclaim.
If you take away one thing from my nightmare story, it’s to stay calm when disaster strikes. In video production, you have to wear many hats, and things will go wrong at some point — it’s a matter of when, not if. You need to keep a clear, calm head to find a solution that may not be the first (or even the fourth) one that comes to mind. And always back up your files multiple times. I mean it.
