The Future Is Now

For the 2025 NBA Draft, WME Sports asked us to create individual films for four draftees represented by WME Basketball, plus one combined piece featuring all four (see the full campaign here). Each film traces the same arc: from a kid's hoop dreams to draft night.

The hard part

Athlete schedules. Every player had a very limited window on set — for most of them we set a five-to-ten-minute timer and had to get every shot and angle inside it. That puts a ceiling on how much story you can tell in-camera, so everything else had to be ready before they walked in.

How we made it work

We used the pre-light day to walk through every scenario and every shot, so nothing on the shoot day was being solved for the first time. We went as far as filming a stand-in version and cutting it the night before, to prove the concept and confirm the sequence would flow. On the day, that meant we could simply execute — with speed, and with confidence.

On set

Santa Barbara, California, over three days: a pre-light day and two production days. Production: MV2 Productions with WME Sports. Co-director: Corey Easley. Co-director and DP: Maurice Victor II. Producer: Dez Hester. Production design: Eden Isabelle. Gaffer: Kevin Woodruff. Key grip: Tom Peake. Editor: Wyeth Collins. Voiceover: Damon Webb. BTS video: Cooper Smith. Shot on the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K with DZO Arles primes (25, 50 and 100), edited in Premiere Pro and graded in DaVinci Resolve.

The result

WME released each film alongside its player's draft announcement, in collaboration with the players' own pages and others. The campaign outperformed the previous year's, and three of the four players went as lottery picks — including Dylan Harper, taken second overall by the San Antonio Spurs. The Future Is Now won a Silver Davey Award in the Sports category in 2025.

‍