With an advanced production schedule to meet TaylorMade's rushed deadline, my Co-Lead Project Manager Evan Falco and I began script and style development. While we explored numerous more abstract options, we landed on a polished, crisp, friendly tone to appeal to the client’s primary audience of young to middle-aged golf enthusiasts.
Becoming masters of relevant golf terminology and the app’s inner-workings was vital to managing this production. One wrong word or inaccurate use of course nomenclature could lead professionals viewing the video to think the app wasn’t up to par.
By focusing on one main character amongst several supporting background characters, the story remained focused on the single customer’s journey from discovering, using, shopping in, and tracking scores all within the app. This character needed to be professional, well-dressed, and expressive to maximize relatability. The platform UI has also undergone simplification to increase visual clarity, while staying mostly true-to-life for product accuracy.
My rough initial thumbnails are pictured to the right.
Not only did we want to exemplify that golf often is a partner-based group activity, but I particularly prioritized harnessing the beauty of the natural environments that golf often lends itself to. I discussed numerous options with the client to boost the visual wonder of our background illustrations - from sweeping desert courses surrounded by palms and cacti to majestic alpine forests teeming with life.
Our team of artists v1 sketched storyboard is pictured to the left.
Instead of jumping around too much from place to place, our final direction was to show numerous angles of a coastal course, to take advantage of lush green foliage and glistening water under the early morning sky
As the animation stage of production picked up, we re-worked the narrative to produce several additional 15-second and 30-second cut downs of the video in a variety of aspect ratios. After final sound mixing and delivery of all final assets, these videos were used as advertisements and promoted posts on the client’s social media, to show off that the TaylorMade Golf App is the most connected golf app on and off the course.
Note: All preparation, materials, visuals, and sketches, including all electronic files used to create the project remain the property of TaylorMade Golf and Explainly.