Piero F. Giunti was three years old the first time he heard Los Lobos in his family’s home. He didn’t know then that thirty years later he’d be co-directing the band’s first documentary feature. He also didn’t know he’d spend five years on the road capturing 100TB of footage across more than 55 interviews.
But there he was, the night before a Los Lobos music video premiered at Dodger Stadium, asking the band a question that would change his career.
“Guys, what would it take to do your documentary?”
They looked at him like he was kidding. He wasn’t.
“At first, they looked at me like, ‘Are you serious?’” Giunti tells us. “I said ‘yes’ and pitched the idea. They told me, ‘Build your team, and to make it fair, we’ll have you go up against some of our filmmaker friends and see who’s the best choice.’”
He won the gig. Then the real work started.
Documenting Los Lobos
Giunti met Los Lobos lyricist Louie Perez through “A Great Day in East LA,” an oral history and portrait archival project he’d spent years building. Perez later hand-picked Giunti as the band’s personal photographer. That relationship eventually opened the door to the documentary.
What pushed him to ask in the first place wasn’t ambition. It was timing.
“They were just getting back on the road coming out of the pandemic, and I knew we couldn’t wait,” Giunti says. “Even if we weren’t the ones who ultimately got to make the film, it felt too important not to start capturing it.”
Los Lobos was entering its 50th year with all five original members still in the lineup. The band played quinceañeras and backyard weddings long before it played the White House. To Giunti, the story was bigger than music.
“My gut told me this is one of the greatest American bands,” he says. “The objective was simple: document everything, by any means necessary.”
Building the archive
Once the band gave him the green light, Giunti faced an unusual problem. Fifty years of fan footage and band recordings had piled up across nearly every consumer format ever made.
Super 8. Hi8. MiniDV. VHS. Beta tapes. Audio cassettes. 4-track reels. DAT tapes. Even an audio floppy that nobody on the team had seen before.
“It was a full range of formats across decades,” Giunti says. “It really took a village.”
His friend Cesar Mejia, a music producer who has worked with Herbie Hancock, handled audio digitization. Mejia cleaned the recordings and built rough mixes. Josh Grody handled final mixes. Video digitization was carried out across a network of trusted collaborators.
To house everything, Giunti turned to OWC. The archive lived on two 140TB ThunderBay Flex 8 units, along with a ThunderBay 4. The team worked through 100TB of the 140TB available. That number covers the band’s archival material plus every frame Giunti and his crew shot themselves.
“Thanks to OWC, we were able to handle it,” he says. “We relied on fast, reliable storage.”
Fifty-five interviews
Giunti estimates the team filmed more than 55 interviews. Most shoots ran two to four cameras, depending on the location. The interview list reads like a Who’s Who of American music. Tom Waits. Linda Ronstadt. Peter Frampton. Rubén Blades. Café Tacuba.
Most sit-downs happened either at an artist’s home or in a rented space with a hard-out. That meant the team had to shoot fast, break down faster and then offload card data wherever they could find a flat surface.
“A lot of times that was happening in the car, at the airport waiting for a flight, or just hoping the transfers finished before we had to pack up,” Giunti says.
The run-and-gun workflow
“We’re all seasoned professionals, but we approached this film like underdogs,” Giunti says. “We had to move fast, stay resourceful and make every moment count.”
The team’s road kit centered on portable OWC drives. The OWC ThunderBlade and Express 1M2 handled the heaviest transfers. The OWC Envoy Ultra and OWC Envoy Pro Mini covered everything in between.
“The Envoy Pro Mini especially saved us multiple times during multi-day shoots on the road,” Giunti says. “It was key for quickly transferring data to our post teams.”
Card workflow evolved over production. Early on, the crew used Atomos Ninjas paired with G-Drive SSDs for external recording, plus standard SD and microSD cards for drone footage. As the cameras got upgraded, so did the cards.
“We moved over to OWC Atlas Ultra cards with the Atlas Dual SD Reader,” Giunti says. “That was definitely a game-changer for us in terms of speed.”
Cameras were a mixed bag by necessity. Budgets were tight, so the team shot with whatever was on hand. The kit included Canon C80s, C70s, C300 Mk III and C50s. Sony FX6, a7S III and a7 III bodies covered other shooters. DJI Mavic 3 Pro and Mavic Air 2 drones handled aerial work. Blackmagic Design bodies got pulled in when a scene called for it. For bigger multi-cam days, the team got rental support from Steve Abrego at R-Gear Rental House in Burbank.
The OWC ThunderBlade SSDs became the connective tissue of the operation, doing double duty as shuttle drives. The same day the crew landed back in Los Angeles, sometimes the next morning, those drives moved straight to post-production.
“There were times where I had to stick around and wait for the drives to finish transferring just so we could take them back out on the road the next day,” Giunti says. “They were essential to keeping everything moving without falling behind.”
The real challenge
Fitting fifty years of music history into a two-hour film is a logistical problem. Getting a band that has guarded its story for that long to actually open up is a problem entirely different.
“In many ways, it became a form of therapy for everyone involved,” Giunti says.
Co-director Doug Piero helped Giunti navigate that side of the work. Together, they brought a multi-generational and multicultural perspective, and Giunti credits them with getting the film across the finish line.
“It was important to me that we preserved the band’s cultural legacy,” he says. “A band that has always played by their own rules and won.”
Personal stakes
Giunti made his first film while becoming a new dad. So did both DPs, Jose Cardenas and Brian Hashimoto. Long days, little sleep, whatever good food and rest the road would allow.
“This was personal from the start,” Giunti says. “I’ve been around this band for years, so stepping into this role wasn’t about discovering their story. It was about doing it justice.”
He says he’ll remember the trust the band placed in him, the patience of his collaborators and the gear that kept everything moving when there wasn’t time to stop.
“More than anything, this film taught me that if you stay true to the story and committed to the work, it will carry you through. This one means everything to me.”
Five years in, the documentary is the kind of project that reshapes a filmmaker’s career. Giunti walked in as a photographer with one music video to his name. He walked out with a feature, a co-directing credit and a road-tested workflow built around storage that didn’t crack under pressure.
The OWC drives that anchored the production are still on his desk. They’ll be there for the next project too.
“Once I started using the drives, I was hooked,” Giunti says. That conversion happened in the field, somewhere between an airport gate and a backyard interview. It stuck.
To learn more about OWC’s line of storage products, you can go to owc.com.
