The Utah Jazz were entering a rebuild year with a roster full of unknown first-year players. The challenge: build an audience connection with players fans had never seen before, and do it before the season tipped off.

Most sports content waits for performance to drive the narrative. We flipped that. We'd create the story first.

Human first, basketball second

I developed a series format that followed each rookie through their first weeks in Salt Lake City, their backgrounds, their families, their adjustments. The basketball was the backdrop, not the lead.

Shooting was intimate and handheld. Editing was paced like a short film, not a highlight reel. Music choices were intentional: scoring emotion, not energy.

Platform strategy

Each episode was cut specifically for YouTube long-form, with social-first vertical clips pulled for TikTok and Instagram Reels. Every piece of content drove back to the full episode.

Kaulig Racing was a smaller team in a sport dominated by powerhouse names like Hendrick and Penske. Most fans didn't know their drivers, their culture, or why they should care.

The brief: create a series that built genuine fan investment in a team most people had overlooked.

Personality over performance

We embedded with the team across multiple race weekends, capturing the chaos behind the pit wall: the arguments, the humor, the pressure. The series leaned into the team's personality rather than their results.

Each episode opened in the middle of action, then pulled back to context. No talking-head-first, no safe corporate framing. It felt like cinema, not a press release.

AI-assisted production

This was one of the first NASCAR productions to use AI tooling in pre-production. I used AI for script expansion, interview question generation, and post-production organization, cutting prep time significantly and giving the creative team more room to focus on storytelling.