I volunteer at my local junior AFL club and my role as club registrar grants access to a sports management platform called PlayHQ. It’s a rich source of data so for the end of the 2026 season, I thought it would be fun to use some of that data to create a season summary in an informational video format. You can see the result in the video, above.

This post is not a how-to, just a brief summary of the tools that I used.

The input data: CSV files downloaded from the available reports in PlayHQ. These include data describing player registration, games played and venues.

A lot of R users seem to be moving towards the Positron IDE and Quarto to generate presentation material. I’m still using RStudio and RMarkdown, simply because that’s what I know best right now. The key packages for this project: ggplot2 of course; waffle to show player counts; sf, leaflet, geosphere, tidyterra, osrm and maptiles for geographical data; wordcloud for, well, word clouds.

I used the RMarkdown file to sketch out each slide and generate one high-quality graphic per slide in PNG format, or in some cases as an animated GIF. Next, I used Keynote to create the final slides from the imported PNG files. I’ve had Keynote sitting largely unopened on every Mac that I’ve owned for years – turns out that it’s pretty good – not least because you can export the final product straight to video. I used a custom resolution of 1170×2532 to match my (iPhone 13) screen, which seems to work OK on most current phone screens.

There’s plenty of free-to-use cheesy corporate music online to choose from, then it’s just a case of fiddling with the slide transitions to sync the music and any animations. Getting the timing right for slides that contain animated GIFs can be a bit tricky – quite honestly I don’t recall what worked best, other than clicking on the item, selecting the “Movie” tab in the right sidebar menu and “adjusting until it works”.

Once the run-through in Keynote looks and sounds good, export to video and it’s ready to share.