Post-production Supervision,
16 & Recovering
Client
Viacom / MTV Networks
Year
2019 — 2020
Background
Directed by Steve Liss and acquired by MTV/Viacom, 16 & Recovering spent a full year embedded inside Northshore Recovery High School in Beverly, MA — following nine students navigating addiction and high school at the same time. It premiered September 2020 and won the RFK Journalism Award for Domestic Television the following year, presented by Soledad O'Brien.
I joined before acquisition, when the project had 218 shooting days, 60+ TB of footage across multiple drives, and no post-production infrastructure. My job was to build it.
What I did
I audited every drive, folder and clip, mapped all conflicting file names against production logs and previous project files using a custom python script, batch renamed and reorganized the affected media, and rebuilt the Premiere Pro project from scratch with everything correctly linked. Alongside that, I built a proxy transcoding pipeline in a mirrored folder structure to cut load times and reduce working file size. To keep 8 assistant editors synchronized without version conflicts, I designed a standardized footage-logging template with a color-coded metadata system so their offline timelines could be consolidated into the master project cleanly.
Role
Post-Production Supervisor
Recognition
2021 RFK Journalism Award
The problem
Buried in the footage was a critical failure nobody had resolved: a camera had been factory-reset on day 101, causing it to regenerate file names already used in the first 100 days. Premiere Pro silently relinked to the wrong clips throughout the timeline. The assembly cut was incoherent, as files pointed to the wrong clips in the wrong sequences, with no clear indication of where the damage started. Premiere’s relink media feature was causing the issue, and manually re-linking thousands of individual clips across hundreds of folders was out of the question.
Over 200 hours of edited material was affected. The project had to be paused because no one knew where to begin troubleshooting it.
Results
Production was fully stabilized and assembly and editing went on smoothly. We were able to finalize in time the assembly cut to show MTV executives. The series was acquired by them shortly after, premiered on MTV and is currently streaming on Paramount+.