PaceJam Trailer Production Case Study

Storyboarding, filming, scoring, and editing a capstone marketing trailer from the ground up.

PROJECT DATE: Spring 2026

ROLE: Storyboard artist, director, cinematographer, composer, and editor

PROJECT OVERVIEW:

As part of the PaceJam capstone project — an app that automatically selects music to match your running pace — our team needed a polished marketing trailer to anchor our final presentation. I led the creative production from concept to delivery: developing the narrative, drawing the storyboard, directing and capturing the majority of on-ground footage, coordinating drone shots with collaborator Chris Gerlach, composing original music in Reaper DAW using VST instruments, and editing the final cut in DaVinci Resolve.

THE PROBLEM:

A great app still needs to be communicated. PaceJam had a strong concept — music that adapts in real time to how fast you’re running — but for a capstone presentation audience, the app itself wasn’t enough. We needed a piece of media that could convey the feeling of the product: the energy of a run, the seamlessness of the experience, and the problem it solves, all without requiring the audience to open an app or read a spec sheet.

The trailer had to do what good marketing always does: make someone feel something before they fully understand the thing being sold. That meant crafting a genuine narrative arc from raw footage, not just a montage of product screenshots.

THE SOLUTION:

Starting with a storyboard

Before any footage was captured, I developed the narrative concept and translated it into a storyboard. This was the blueprint for everything that followed — it established the pacing, the shot types, and the emotional arc of the trailer. A storyboard might seem like extra work at the outset, but on a project with multiple collaborators and a drone operator on a schedule, it’s the document that keeps everyone aligned and prevents wasted shoots.

A beta trailer as proof of concept

Before committing to a full production, I created a rough “beta” trailer using stock footage. This served two purposes: it let the team pressure-test the narrative before investing in a full shoot, and it gave me a chance to explore the editing approach in DaVinci Resolve before the stakes were high. Treating the beta as a disposable prototype is a principle borrowed directly from software development — ship something scrappy, learn from it, then build the real thing.

[embed]PaceJam’s Beta Trailer — Featuring Mr. Blue Sky, and opening interstitial music by me.

Filming: coordinating ground and drone footage

For the main shoot, I captured the majority of the on-ground footage myself, while providing detailed shot descriptions to Chris Gerlach, who contributed drone coverage. Working with a drone operator introduced a challenge I hadn’t fully anticipated: the drone footage came back noticeably washed out compared to the richer, more saturated DSLR footage. Matching those two sources in post-production became one of the central technical challenges of the project.

Chris Listening intently to our instructions while he set up his drone

Editing: learning motion tracking in production

DaVinci Resolve handled the full edit. Beyond the color grading challenge, I tackled motion tracking and moving text — techniques I understood conceptually but hadn’t yet executed. There’s a particular kind of learning that only happens under deadline pressure with real footage in front of you, and this project delivered that in full. The motion tracking work, where text elements follow subjects through the frame, added a layer of visual polish that elevated the trailer from a student project to something that felt genuinely produced.

PaceJam Trailer Editing Timeline whithin Davinci Resolve

The music: a creative decision made by committee

I composed some original music for the trailer in Reaper DAW, using VST instruments and my own saxophone to play something that matched the frustrated energy of a pre-PaceJam Kylie. The trailer starts with Kylie getting fed up with her run, and aleviating that annoyance with PaceJam, and we needed a score to match.

The Reaper project for the PaceJam Trailer

The music was one of the pieces of this project I was most personally proud of. Ultimately, the group decided to go a different direction, and the original music was cut in favor of stock music instead. That was a hard creative call to accept, but it’s also an honest reflection of how collaborative media production works: your best individual contribution doesn’t always survive contact with the group. What I took from it was the experience of scoring to picture — a skill I hadn’t practiced before and one I’ll carry forward.

If you are interested, you can check out the interstitial music below:

[embed]

The final trailer

What I’m most proud of isn’t any single technical achievement — it’s the storytelling. A storyboard creates a plan, but editorial instinct is what turns a plan into something that actually moves people. Watching the final cut come together, and seeing the creative choices I made on the storyboard and in the edit room translate into something our team was proud to present, was the clearest validation of what filmmaking and editing actually are: not technical exercises, but tools for making people feel things.

[embed]

RESULTS:

The trailer served its purpose as the centerpiece of our capstone presentation, effectively communicating the PaceJam concept to a non-technical audience through narrative and visuals rather than feature lists. The project pushed me into skills I had only understood theoretically — color grading across mixed sources, motion tracking, and composing to picture — and forced me to execute all of them under real production constraints. The experience of losing my original score to a group vote was its own kind of lesson: in collaborative creative work, advocacy matters, and so does knowing when to let go. Future iterations of a project like this would benefit from earlier alignment on the audio direction, before composition begins.