Storyboards - Scholarly Review Wk 11
I am in my third semester of the graduate program in eLearning Design and Implementation at The University of Colorado, Denver. Each week we post a Scholarly Article Review for my Learning with Digital Stories course, ILT5340. This week I choose chapter 8, Storyboarding, from Joe Lambert's Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Communities.
I always struggle with how things will come together as any idea for a digital story starts dancing in my head. This chapter of Joe Lambert’s Digital Storytelling book provided great processes and benefits of creating storyboards.
Lambert’s approach is simple. The storyboard is in essence a concept board, not a script. The example he uses includes a title, a few pictures, effects, transitions, a short video clip, and soundtrack description. Nothing visually or within the construct too overwhelming for novice digital storytellers like myself.
Lambert always explains things in a simplistic way that gives the reader confidence they can do it. Each picture has just a few words underneath to get the gist. Yet, the words chosen somehow give the story visual context, feel, and a sense of connection to a place.
This I believe is the “art” of storytelling. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; also true an emotion expressed with a character feeds a thousand connections.
In this article Lambert’s student simply placed some pictures of her mom and pictures of her mom with her children and some words from the voiceover “Across and between cultures, a young woman, a doctor, a wife, I think back to who she was as a girl.”
Immediately I wanted to know who she was too!
Technically Lambert walks the reader through the mental processes:
First dimension time. What happens first, next, last? Interaction; how the audio, voiceover narrative and/or music interacts with the images/video.
Notes regarding where visual effects such as transitions, animations, or compositional organization of the screen will be used.
Taking the time to storyboard clarifies what you will need (assets) and what you do not need.
Word of caution: without a script and an idea of how the story is told a digital story can become a quagmire. Storyboarding is an extremely productive use of your time.
