Set Life: Drew Sawyer of Moonshine Post-Production catches lightning in a bottle

ArtsATL’s Set Life series focuses on local creatives who work in Atlanta’s film and television industry. We’ll talk to those who work on both sides of the camera and explore their struggles and successes in navigating Georgia’s volatile film and TV scene.

Drew Sawyer was at university in Germany when a trip back home to Atlanta for his sister’s wedding turned his life in a whole different direction — a direction that would light up a potent creative fire that has not quelled since.

“I was a member of a filmmaking co-op called Studio Outpost before I went to grad school, and I rejoined it when I came back,” he says.

Over time, the co-op friends made countless movies — most of them bad, Sawyer says — but a number of them were quite good, so good they helped propel careers in the film and television industry.

One of them was the 2012 film V/H/S, which had a showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

“It was an all-hands-on-deck indie movie,” Sawyer describes. “I literally ran camera and acted in it. And it was posted at Studio Outpost by director David Bruckner, [now] a very famous filmmaker member of the group.”

Sawyer adds, “The cool thing is that it started hyper-local and grassroots,” Sawyer says.

From there, with few full post-production services in Atlanta, Sawyer decided to set up his own — Moonshine Post-Production. He turned to fellow Atlanta-based post-production artist John Petersen to partner with him.

“[John] met me when I was 21, making one of my first movies,” Sawyer recalls. Petersen ran a film lab at the time, and Sawyer ended up there by chance.

“So John met with me and said, ‘Hey, I really like what you’re doing here. I’ll ask management if I can cut you a break, and I’ll do your indie with you,’” Sawyer says. “He went out on a limb for me, and he did my film for cheap and made my really bad [early] movie a little bit better.”

Sawyer adds, “And he over-delivered. He taught me that. He paid it forward to me and taught me the process of what it was like to be a professional collaborator and the process of interpreting my creative with my first movie.”

Today, 15 years later, the successful full-service operation remains a joint passion for Sawyer and Petersen and a livelihood for their families.

Moonshine’s services include the preparation of dailies (the processing and organization of raw, unedited footage and files that’s put together for directors, cinematographers and producers to check after each day’s filming); creative editing once a shoot is complete; sound design; color correction (fixes made to footage to ensure that it’s uniform, color-wise, from start to finish); and color grading (enhancement of the color, contrast and tone of a film).

Even though Atlanta cemented its status as a major U.S. film production hub well before the pandemic, post-production is still largely viewed as a service that film and TV creators take back to Los Angeles after shooting in studios and locations around film tax-incentivized Georgia (20% tax credit for qualifying film projects spending more than $500,000 in the state, along with an additional 10% credit for running the peach logo in the credits at the end).

But in January 2026, Georgia reinstated a post-production tax credit that previously existed from 2018 to 2023, in hopes of buoying post-production business in the state.

According to Sawyer, “The new [credit] was designed to incentivize post infrastructure, essentially to build, headquarter and relocate people and work opportunities here to the state [outside the main Atlanta production zone and into rural areas].”

As he describes it: “It’s a post vendor-side credit.”

In many ways, Moonshine, Sawyer and Petersen helped pave the way for the entrepreneurs who will follow. And they are still paving it today.

“[In the beginning], it took about six years of being like, ‘Hey, you can get [post-production] done here, too. We have the skills and talent and parity. You don’t have to just come here and shoot and leave,’” Sawyer says. “But there were also a lot of early successes.”

One of the bright spots in the early days was that studios and networks began turning to Sawyer and Moonshine Post-Production for smaller, ancillary post services.

“So I [began] consulting with and performing additional post direction to networks and studios, and kudos to the producers that work on those shows, those who were like, ‘We heard you do post, and does that mean you can do post in Georgia?’”

Sawyer adds, “Let me tell you, I did a lot of Georgia post-production spokesmanship in the first 10 years of building the business.”

It was a message that Sawyer apparently articulated well, because the business grew steadily.

Moonshine’s first physical home was in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, and recently the business took up a new studio space in Glenwood Park on the Beltline. The business also added a sister company about six years ago, Boom Post Audio, for mixing, ADR (automated dialogue replacement) and sound design for film.

“Our reputation precedes us today, and I couldn’t be prouder,” Sawyer says of the progress the Moonshine team has made in the industry. And still, the process is ongoing in light of competition from longtime film markets like LA and New York.

“It’s still somewhat of an uphill battle,” Sawyer admits.

“Going and changing that mindset was the first and actually hardest part of building the business. It wasn’t the talent. It wasn’t the infrastructure. It wasn’t the capabilities. It was literally saying, ‘You can also do post here,’” Sawyer states.  

For film industry hopefuls and especially those interested in a career in post-production, Sawyer says that aside from technical chops and innate artistry, someone who hopes to build a career must have a willingness to dive headlong into collaboration with other filmmakers. It’s something he learned early on working with his filmmaking tribe, and it’s a non-negotiable.

“Find the people that you can iterate with in a friction-free and judgment-free environment, whatever that is,” Sawyer stresses. “In post-production we have to find people that we can iterate with, because post-production is inherently collaboration. It’s an idea that is written, developed, produced and directed, and then we work with those creatives … we’re the last part of that giant signal chain.”

And he adds, “We’re going to interpret the film with [its creators] and improve upon their direction as best we can until we run out of time or money or resources to do so because of a delivery date.”

Collaboration, Sawyer says, taught him to move in tandem with the creative flow.

“The collaboration taught me to see things through other people’s eyes,” he describes. “And also to be quick on my feet, creatively, complementing something or adding to something or iterating on something — alongside someone else.”

What does collaboration look like for Sawyer today, from his vantage as a seasoned post professional and business owner?

“We’re all working together, and there’s a giant post crew that’s at the tail end. And it’s our turn to help carry the project to completion,” he says. “[So if you’re new], you’ve got to get out there and meet the 200 different types of directors, whether they’re your friends, your schoolmates or randoms and then figure out how to connect.”

Today, Sawyer is helping up-and-coming post-production pros connect and improve upon their skills. On September 26 and September 27 at The Plaza Theater, for instance, Moonshine Post-Production is backing Post Atlanta Conference 2026, where Sawyer is a featured speaker.

“Those grassroots are still prevalent,” Sawyer says of the collaborative ethos that sparks the creative fire at Moonshine, which today employs 11 full-time people.

“I actually just got back from hiking and backpacking for five days in Colorado with several of the [original] group of filmmakers from the early days. We’ve been friends ever since before we built careers.”

Moonshine Post-Production’s latest full post project — the comedy Idiots, starring Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. and directed by Macon Blair — hits U.S. theaters on August 28, 2026.

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Carol Badaracco Padgett is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who focuses on film and television, the automotive industry, architectural design and collaborative storytelling projects.