The story spine was built before anyone arrived in Houston. Each day of the week was assigned a theme in advance, opening on practice-round Monday with the championship arriving, so every nightly edit had a job before the footage existed. From there the pipeline ran on a daily cadence: capture on site, nightly handoff, cut overnight, deliver next morning — with check-ins mid-edit rather than one review at the end, so direction could shift while the week was still live. The test came when b-roll arrived thinner than planned. Instead of stretching coverage, the edit leaned into character and authenticity — individual faces and moments over wide shots — and the client’s reaction to the second film was that it felt more real. The constraint pushed the work closer to the brief, not further from it.