What It Takes to Win Short doc
3 crew, 1 subject and 3 shoot days
Story
What It Takes to Win began as Sam Thomas’s capstone, a three-part piece about people who push through big setbacks. It worked better as one story, so it became a short doc about Paje Rasmussen, a sprinter at BYU. Paje is an NCAA athlete, and we shot in the middle of her competition season, so her schedule was gnarly. We worked around her school schedule, her travel and her meets. We had half a semester, so we could say, “In three weeks, when you’re back from this tournament, we’ll come film you after practice.” A good project doesn’t have to happen in a day.
Paje Rasmussen has broken the indoor 200m and 60m records for BYU, as well as the 100m outdoor school record.
Sam asked me to produce it early on, when we were first coming up with the idea, and to help him write it. We spent a long time going back and forth on ideas, different ways to write it and how to structure it, and a lot of how the final story is told came out of that.
Credits
- Producer and co-writer
- Tommy Van Dyke
- Produced it from the first idea and helped write it, working out the story’s structure with the writer.
- Director and DP
- Josh Dahl
- Writer and editor
- Sam Thomas
Frames
