Creating Percy Jackson and the Olympians took a village. Fans saw the serialized adaptation of Rick Riordan’s best-selling novels unravel over the course of two months on Disney+, but the path to bringing these episodes to the streaming screen was years in the making. That undertaking is chronicled in A Hero’s Journey: The Making of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a documentary feature that showcases the extensive production process that leading man Walker Scobell and company went on.
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“We’ve got a very great and longstanding relationship with the folks at Disney,” A Hero’s Journey director Joel Edwards told ComicBook.com. “Some of the people over there in the marketing department are some of the first relationships and clients that I ever had when we started Evolve Studios.”
Unlike the traditional documentary process, Edwards and his team was tasked with creating something out of pre-existing footage rather than filming his own content.
“We were approached after they had already shot a bunch of the series and they had this pile of behind-the-scenes footage,” Edwards continued. “They were originally going to use it for vignettes and some BTS. They just had hard drives and hard drives of footage. ‘We have all this footage, what could we do with it?’”
The footage in question was 108 days-worth and occupied multiple terabytes.
“It’s hard to get your mind around,” Edwards noted. “How do we craft a story that’s compelling, that’s emotional, that has its own story arc and its own character journey? That’s tough to do if you don’t do it on the front end, if you’re not intentionally crafting and scripting from the beginning. This was very much a let’s go mining for story gold and try to put that feature-length project together.
“This was no small feat. This took a lot of time, countless hours, months of work to go in there and to try to create that story arc. After we had kind of molded it and started to establish our three-act structure in those story beats, our team, Mark, who I call the story magician, and a bunch of the rest of our editorial team identified some other areas that we could bring some vision to.”
That “story magician” is lead editor Mark Ablaza. Ablaza sifted through thousands of hours of content in hopes of landing on that aforementioned “story gold.”
“What we kept going to is that we don’t know exactly what’s in there, but we know that these kids are getting thrown into the fire of a huge production of a massive franchise,” Ablaza told ComicBook.com. “That in itself is compelling. Following their journey and their growth is compelling. We also discovered that in their parents and their families as well.”
While Percy Jackson‘s core trio was the heart of A Hero’s Journey, the documentary gave flowers to all avenues of the Disney+ production. A Hero’s Journey features in-depth looks at the usage of The Volume stage, the crafting process of Camp Half-Blood, and more.
“We wanted something that spoke to all the different elements of this production, this massive production, and spoke to all the different talented departments,” Edwards said. “They had some of the most talented filmmakers in the world involved with this.”
Once the vision was decided, the Evolve Studios team moved on to actually piecing out what Percy Jackson behind-the-scenes footage they actually wanted to use.
“A rule for me when approaching this kind of work is that the footage will tell you what it should be,” Ablaza mentioned. “If you’re trying to cut down a hundred days into 50 minutes, you can bend things into the way that you want, into the pace that you want, but really the footage is going to let you know what’s important. It’s just being mindful of when you are going through the dailies and the weeklies, taking the mental notes of the things that you become engaged with yourself.”
“I like to bring a very strong position and a vision of what we’re trying to say. This is the thesis. This is our through line. This is the instinctual feeling that we want to invoke. From there, it really becomes trust to Mark and his team,” Edwards added. “To Mark’s point, we have to trust the footage. We can manipulate the feeling with music and how it’s paced and how it’s put together, but the footage is the footage.”
One key element of footage that was unavailable were the Percy Jackson audition tapes, which Edwards couldn’t get his hands on due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.
“We were doing all this during the actor strike as well. That made things hyper challenging,” Edwards said. “We would sit in brainstorming rooms being like, ‘What can we shoot? Could we do this?’ Nope. ‘Can we pull that casting tape? Could we get the audition footage?’ Nope. We had to really get creative.”
These restrictions forced Edwards and Ablaza to think further outside the box. It was during the process of putting A Hero’s Journey together that Edwards got the idea of .
“This is the world’s first peak at what they know is going on behind curtains, behind closed studio doors. Let’s show them what it means to the audience, the anticipation, the expectation,” Edwards said of the original footage in A Hero’s Journey. “We even got to do some cool stuff with my own kids who read the book. Some of those shots in there are my kids reading the books, their personal Percy Jackson collection.”
That NYCC footage and blurred clips of Edwards’s children reading the Percy Jackson novels bookended the 50-minute polished product.
“We’re grateful to tell the story. I think the thing I’m most proud of is just how emotional this thing turned out,” Edwards said. “You’re really gripped by it. I set my own children through it, and even my little one was sitting there glued. She’s still seven years old and loved it. I think that that speaks to the incredible job that Mark and (story producer) Amelia Watson and our team did, making those movements engaging and sustaining even where a little kid can sit there and watch it.”
“This was honestly one of my favorite projects I think I’ve ever worked on, and I wasn’t expecting it to be,” Ablaza said. “The genesis of the story came from a place of goodwill. Of a father trying to make his son feel more comfortable in the world. I really connected to it at that point.”
A Hero’s Journey: The Making of Percy Jackson and the Olympians is now streaming on Disney+.
