The Project
The PGA of America needed a dedicated instructional video production for their PGA.Coach app – a coaching platform for golf instructors working with young athletes – and needed a library of videos to power the app’s fundamental movement assessment tools. The brief was specific: 16 fundamental movement skills, each one filmed at four distinct levels of athletic development, producing two separate video series from the same footage. Thirty-two finished videos in total.
We came into this project through a collaboration with Matt Young of The Quality Sport Hub, who brought the sports science expertise and the movement framework. Our job was to translate that framework into video that coaches could actually use – clear, clean, and precise enough to serve as a reference point when assessing real athletes in the field. This wasn’t a cinematic brief. It was a production efficiency challenge wrapped in a coaching tool.
Instructional Video Production
The entire shoot was completed in a single full day. Sixteen fundamental movement skills – skipping, running, rolling, dodging, throwing, and more – each captured at four levels of ability: initial, emerging, competent, and proficient. That’s a tight schedule for the volume of setups involved, and it required the kind of pre-production planning that makes a one-day shoot actually work: locked shot list, rehearsed transitions between setups, and a clear visual standard for every movement before the camera rolled.
The specific challenge of this project was consistency. Because the whole point of the videos is to help coaches compare what they’re seeing in front of them against a defined standard, every clip needed to be shot from the same angle, in the same framing, with the same clean background – across all sixteen movements and all four ability levels. Any variation in the visual presentation would undermine the assessment tool’s usefulness. Directed by Atlee James and Oliver Smith.
Post Production
From the day’s footage, we cut two distinct video series for integration into the PGA.Coach app. The first – the assessment series – shows coaches what each movement looks like at each level of development, giving them a visual benchmark to measure their athletes against. The second, the “Show Me” series, flips the purpose: instead of assessment, these videos are instructional, giving coaches a tool to demonstrate proper technique and guide athletes toward the next level.
Keeping those two series editorially distinct while working from the same raw footage required a clear editorial approach in the edit. The pacing, framing emphasis, and any supporting motion graphics had to serve a different function in each series, even when the underlying clip was the same movement. Thirty-two finished videos were delivered and incorporated into the PGA.Coach platform.
Client: PGA of America
Producers: Matt Young / Atlee James
Directors: Atlee James / Oliver Smith
Video Editing and Design: Atlee James