Effective Storyboarding (adapted from the original)
By Jeanette P. Evans, Associate Fellow, and Gillian McKnight-Tutein
How can storyboards help you with your projects and what are the qualities of a good storyboard? This article describes storyboards and how you can effectively use them for your projects.
What is Storyboarding?
One definition of storyboarding is that of a highly interactive, visual process that combines both creative and analytical thinking, also known as “displayed thinking,”, as defined by Grace McGartland of Thunderbolt Thinking. She also notes continues by noting that a storyboard can be a screen-by-screen sequence of frames detailing what learners will see, hear, and/or do during a specific type of experience. Elements of a typical traditional storyboard with multiple elements include:
- Project information
- Objectives
- Audio/narration
- Video clips
- Graphics
- On-screen text
- Navigation and interactivity
- Relevant notes
Some basic reasons to use storyboarding include that storyboarding can:
- Facilitate Facilitating communication within a working team
- Preventing costly errors
- Allowing everyone to share ideas
- Promote Promoting buy-in and consensus
- Identifying problems before anything is developed
- Helping to generate new ideas
History of Storyboarding
Leonardo da Vinci was the first person thought to have used formal “storyboarding” in planning his artwork. It is also believed that his rival Michaelangelo also took up the practice. There are earlier accounts of the practice of mapping planned attacks and architecture captured in cave drawings.
Modern use of storyboarding began with Walt Disney and his cartoonists in 1929 with the making of “Steamboat Willie,” the first animated cartoon feature. The visual planning model pioneered and perfected by Disney is used in many other industries today, such as marketing and, instructional design, and of course movie making. It has become an inexpensive way to present ideas and gather valuable input before the final product is created.
An example of how Disney uses storyboarding is at “Finding Lady: The Art of Storyboarding,” at ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2412052664775629371).
How We Can Apply a Wide Definition
If we look at Wikipedia, we see a wide understanding of storyboarding. This wide definition shows storyboards as any graphic organizers. This can include a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic, or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.
In terms of adapting storyboards to business, the Wikipedia entry notes that storyboards were adapted from the film industry to business, purportedly by Howard Hughes of Hughes Aircraft. Today they are used by businesses industry for planning ad campaigns, commercials, a proposals, or other projects intended to convince or compel to action.
A “quality storyboard” is a tool to help facilitate the introduction of a quality improvement process into an organization.
One advantage of using storyboards is they that it allows in film as well as business the developer to experiment with changes.
The process of visual thinking and planning allows a group of people to brainstorm together, placing their ideas on storyboards and then arranging the storyboards on the a wall. This fosters more ideas and generates consensus inside the group.
Storyboards in this wider definition can appear in many applications, from books to instructions to proposals to processes. If you want to make an idea understood, a storyboard format, or related presentation such as a flow chart or time line, can help. Placing sticky notes on a wall to show the elements of a project— – a set of instructions or project, for example— – is also a possible form of visual representation or storyboarding. A team can view this and rearrange and discuss elements in a convenient form with this approach. Moore explains a related application, which we can also imagine in an electronic format through a spreadsheet: .
A storyboard is a tool used by teams to write documents. Information needed to create the document is posted on cork boards or walls in a designated room accessible to all team members. In this room, the document grows from outline, to draft, to a thoroughly reviewed, /final document. During its growth, the document can be tracked using a simple flagging system.
Why Technical Communicators Should Use Bother with Storyboards
As described by Wiens, those unsomeone not familiar with storyboards often asks the question, "Why bother?" In response, some benefits as related to design for web-based training WBT courses and other applications designs are that storyboards:
- Effectively document elements, communicating all components in one document
- Set a scope
- Permit a collaborative approach
- Clearly communicate to all team members
- Set expectations
- Save time
- Mitigate costs
- Are easy to manage
- Act as quality assurance
Certain technical communication classes include storyboarding as part of the class. One example is at Purdue University where English 421 (: Technical Writing) lists these steps of storyboarding.:
- Find or create a storyboard template that you can use to draft your outline.
- Each frame of your storyboard should represent a unique page, a step in a sequence, or some other individual component of your work (such as a PowerPoint or Keynote slide, a keyframe in Flash, or a Web web page).
- In each frame, identify your content. Use shorthand to describe the content (including images and audio) that you want to include and approximately where it should be placed.
- Add notes to each frame in your storyboard on design, source files, material, and anything else that will help you remember what each frame should contain and how it should be presented.
- When you have completed a rough draft of your storyboard, read back through it to see whether it has an order that makes sense and includes the multimedia you want to use. Move frames around as necessary.
Whether your project could use a storyboard to show a group the details of a Webweb-based tutorial, or you are working with a group to define a process, - or you have another project where you need collaboration and visualization, - storyboarding is a creative tool that could be helpful towards achieving successful completion.
References
Moore, S., “Storyboard Tracking.”, Conference Proceedings, Society for Technical Communication, 1997, 482-483.
Wiens, A., “Using Storyboards to Design Web-based Training,” .” Intercom, September/October 2004 (Sep/Oct 2004):, 10-13.
