Retired Staff Sgt. Travis Mills lives by one mantra: “Never Give Up. Never Quit.” It's the cornerstone of his motivational speeches and the philosophy he applies to every component of his life: family, work, health, philanthropy. Sounds straightforward, right?
How he came to this philosophy in the wake of unimaginable tragedy is the story we tell in Hi, I’m Travis Mills, the first episode of season 2 of Magnolia Network’s “Hi I’m…” series.
Hi, I'm Travis Mills official synopsis:
After surviving an IED explosion in Afghanistan, Travis Mills became a quadruple amputee—one of few to recover from this injury in US military history. While grappling to find purpose in the aftermath, Travis and his family band together to recover and help others along the way.
Director Jon Michael Simpson established the look and tone of the series when Magnolia adapted his feature length documentary Hi I’m Blake into one of the first installments of the show. When he started interviewing editors for Hi I’m Travis Mills, I was recommended to him by a mutual friend of ours (whose own film I did some work on last year). Our first meeting was virtual. It was a lengthy first meeting where we talked about past projects, how we like to work, and Jon Michael’s vision for the episode.
When I watched “Hi, I’m Blake” I was impressed with the way it effectively intercut between verite, interview and archival. It also had a ton of heart. Jon Michael's sense of structure was strong. I felt like we’d work well together. So I was excited when I was offered the chance to join the team on Hi, I’m Travis Mills as its lead editor.
For post, that team included: co-producer Ben Hanks, co-producer and director of photography Jeff McQuitty, additional editor Ryan Vaughn, and animator Victor Maestas.
The shoot was broken up into two legs - one in the spring and one in early summer. We also received traunches of archival - a mix of family home videos, media appearances and footage from the Travis Mills Foundation. About 16 weeks of post production had been budgeted with 12 dedicated to the edit, which is aggressive for a TV hour long but achievable with a good team in place and a well planned workflow.
Ryan processed the footage as it arrived. We had worked together on The Russian Five so he and I already had a short hand in place for working together and how we wanted to organize the project. We worked in Adobe Creative Cloud and edited on Premiere.
Jon Michael and I didn’t begin working together until after the second leg of shooting was complete. It was a 4 week sprint from our assembly cut to our first true rough cut. From there we received notes from Magnolia and completed two more cuts responding to their feedback. Somewhere in that time we managed to shoot an additional interview, staged atmospheric b-roll, and we also received some late-arriving (and critical) archival that had a dramatic impact on the final piece.
TBD Post in Austin, Texas did a tremendous job with color correction, sound mix and final delivery. The score was composed by Hanen Townsend (who also happened to score a previous project I edited, The Sensitives). Both the production and post-production teams got to finally meet face-to-face at a small crew screening the night before Hi, I’m Travis Mills began streaming on Discovery Plus.
Our team gelled amazingly well together. This was a fun one to be a part of - even with such heavy subject matter. at times. I think Travis' sprit and sense of humor rubbed off on us. We felt a great deal of responsibility telling his story and put a lot of thought into translating his emotional journey into this specific format.
This is a brief overview of my role on the project. I look forward to elaborating on specific aspects of the post process in future posts.
