Creating and Planning a New Course

With a few new courses on the horizon for this year we thought it might be interesting to share some insight into what goes on to plan and structure a course before we hit record and capture content.

As you can imagine it’s not as easy as rocking up at venue, waving a camera around and hoping we get some epic footage. It’s very easy to waste time on a shoot, not get the shots needed and create content that has little or no structure. The key is careful planning.

The first stage is to decide the overall theme and aim for the course. Take for example our new Rock Hopping course. The aim for this course is to give people the technical and tactical skills to control their boats around the rocks, make good decisions, be safe and also to grow confidence.

Once we have the overall aim and ideas for the course we start to sketch out some modules and lesson ideas. Typically courses can be broken down in to a series of modules with lessons within these modules. We might start with a fundamentals module with lessons on what equipment we need, key concepts, safety considerations etc.

We like our courses to feel progressive with each lesson building on the last. The information in each lesson should be relevant, easy to understand and easily digestible. Creating a progressive feel isn’t always easy. Not all of our courses lend themselves to following a clear linear progression where the information in next lessons builds on the previous. 

Once we have sketched out the modules and lessons we will share the structure with another coach, perhaps the person we are working with on the course. We can the discuss if the order needs changing, extra lessons need adding or removing. When we are all happy with the lessons and the course will deliver the aims we set out we start to add some more meat to the bones.

Typically everything is pulled into a spread sheet and we start to add detail on what we want the content for each lesson to look like. Key learning points, concepts and ideas that we need to get across in the lessons.

The next stage is to create a shot list for each lesson. The shot list is critical to making sure we work efficiently and effectively when we are on location filming.  We will consider what shots we need for the concepts and and ideas we are trying to convey in the lesson. Lessons will often need a piece to camera introducing the lesson, we might need a piece to camera with space next to it for text or bullet points, maybe we need a piece to camera on the water with the coach talking through a stroke or skill. Next we consider what drone shots we need, top down looking from above or maybe a following shot from behind? Do we need to capture some tight shots of a blade angle? Or do we need sone slow motion shots of a skill being demoed?

On location we will keep referring back to the shot list and content plan making sure we are ticking off the shots we need. This also is not a linear process. We don’t start with the first lesson and systematically work through the course. What we shoot on a given day is often dictated by the locations we find, the conditions and weather on that day. We will typically have an idea of locations and venues and what we might try and capture at that spot. However, we may find a location lends itself to capturing some different shots.

We may also find that a specific location is used for collecting shots for a variety of different lessons. We need to think carefully about how we can use the venues to collect a range of shots off our shot list.

At the end of each day of filming we will review the footage we have got from the day, make sure we are happy and start to tick it off against the shot list. Ideally after our filming period, which can be anything from 2 days to 2 weeks depending on the course we have all the shots we needed ready to start the super long process of editing.