Following a highly competitive pitch, Boulder’s production arm, Pebble Studios, were briefed to create insight-led, engaging content for the new digital platform Studio You, created by Hopscotch, Sport England & This Girl Can. Creating over 100 engaging films to encourage teenage girls in the UK to get back into fitness. Working with fitness consultants and the school’s consortium we created a series of classes across Dance, Yoga, Combat and Fitness and combined these with our film and animation experience to create a library of film content to be utilised by PE teachers in schools nationwide.

In order to maximise quality, quantity and the future-proofing of Studio You, our approach would be to capture exercises as 5-minute modules that would be combined to work as discipline-specific classes or ‘Mix & Match’ themed classes that took multiple modules from varying disciplines.

Working with Fitness Consultant Pearl Appleby, we created a ‘content matrix’ that broke down each of our core disciplines into a range of 30-minute classes, made up of 5-minute modules. We then highlighted specific modules that could be re-categorised into the themed classes. Meaning that we could create numerous iterations of classes without the need for extensive and long-winded shoot timelines.

The first stage of our shoot pre-production phase was finding the stars of our fitness classes. Our team worked with scouts and casting directors, as well as reached out to prominent fitness influencers to source our talent.

Following numerous zoom-based interviews and short class presentations, we picked 8 instructors to lead our classes, working with them to script the content in ways that felt natural to each instructor’s specific style of delivery.

We held rehearsal days ahead of the shoot to ensure that routines were choreographed and practised ahead of time and to allow us to plan our shoot schedules and ensure timings would be stuck to in our edits.

We shot the content over 5 days at Centre Stage Studios, following a precise and rigorous shoot schedule that allowed us to capture over 10 hours of bespoke fitness content for the platform.

Rather than shooting the films on location, we opted for a green screen approach as this would provide us with complete control of the environments the instructors were composited into, but also flexibility in future-proofing the content with the ability to update background assets.

We developed an initial style guide that took influence from social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, utilising bright backgrounds, dynamic stickers and kinetic type to engage, motivate and educate our audience.

As our design developed we incorporated colours that subconsciously encouraged participation in the specific exercise and worked with Education governing bodies to ensure that the content was educationally sound and safe, as well as engaging and enjoyable to the audience.