The 'Making a Murderer' creators detail the intense 10-year path to getting the show on Netflix

It would take a decade, personal sacrifice, and dedication to their vision before the filmmakers behind "Making a Murderer" found a home for the series at Netflix.

It started with an article.

When then-Colombia University students Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos arrived in Wisconsin for Steven Avery's trial, they didn't even know if it would be a story.

In late 2005, they had read a New York Times article about a man who had been exonerated of a crime after serving 18 years in prison only to then be arrested again for murder. Within two weeks, the women were shooting in Wisconsin.

"There was really no time to develop or have pre-production for the project," Ricciardi recently told Business Insider, "because we were documenting a case as it was unfolding and whenever there was downtime relative to that case, we were going back and working on the historical context for the case, so we were constantly in production for the first two years."

About a year into the project, they were given fiscal sponsorship by the New York Foundation for the Arts, which allowed them greater access to private donations and grants. They stayed in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, for about a year and a half straight, documenting Avery and his teen nephew Brendan Dassey's trials and sentencing hearings.

"We then moved back to New York and desperately went back to work," Demos told BI. "Then we would go back and forth for isolated one month, two weeks, five days, depending on what was happening. So for the eight years following that, we were doing isolated shoots, but not the same kind of intense shooting."