Reverse Storyboarding Has Taught Me a Thing or Two

Storyboarding has been something that I’ve “known” is helpful but just have not actually practiced in more than a very cursory way (i.e., PowerPoint slides with screen shots and a bit of text). I think even the majority of my scripts included more details about putting the video together than any of my storyboards.

Perhaps you won’t believe that I didn’t storyboard this to begin with, but please believe me: I did not storyboard it. I just sat down and put it together off the top of my head.

What I Started With

I mentioned in Time to Embrace Storyboarding and Feeling an Emphasis on the Importance of Planning that looking at the color presented just in an explanatory fashion by Jones (n.d.) really clicked with me. I also appreciated the simplicity of the categories of information being applied.

As I’ve been dilly-dallying long enough about actually working with “real” storyboards, I decided to make this assignment personal to me. After mulling it around for a few days I decided to take the plunge and create my own version of a storyboard page to see if that didn’t somehow help make things a bit more real for me – to create something tangible that I could put into work immediately.

And, instead of reverse storyboarding someone else’s product, I took a quick new video I put together for work and reverse storyboarded myself. It was an interesting experience. The following image is a sample of what I put together. The colors really do help me – though I didn’t realize just how closely I was following the example until literally just now!

How I Went About The Reversal

Once I put together the template storyline page, it was actually quite easy to sit down with the video and fill in all of the blanks. As I went through the process, I did modify the size of some of the boxes so I could play with how much room there was for some info – I can see this continuing to be tweaked in general but also for some specific projects or scenes. Once I got into the swing of it, it felt like it took no time at all to identify what went where.

What I Learned

I’ve finally taken my first serious storyboard step! Haha. But honestly, it does feel like a good step. I think might take a reverse storyboarding approach to my crazy course that’s been “in development” for three years and see if that doesn’t help me make more sense of it – that might end up being more of a literal hand-drawn diagram to help me sort it all out (the Storyline diagram makes my brain hurt).

I also have a number of other animations that will be coming up, so with the next one I’m going to use this to start off with and see if I can stick to it. Sometimes I just have so many thoughts and want to throw them all into Vyond immediately.

The other thing that I’ve gained a better appreciation for out of this exercise is for a design document. As I went through my reverse storyboarding I got into details about the character and the voice chosen and then realized I was getting caught up in things that should be addressed from a broader scale than a specific 1 minute 20 second video.

I recently took on a regular (monthly, hopefully) video series and I have a doc of all my notes and the decisions the team’s made, and what both of the animators (I am one) need to keep in mind during script/storyboard/animation development. Without knowing it, I’ve clearly started my design document. Now I am going to go into that document, retitle it, expand it, and make it the truly functional document that it needs to be (especially as we could end up with three animators on the project).

That is where I’ll be able to add on to the table I’ve created about our growing cast of characters (hate it when two characters have the same voice!) and include things about transitions, music and sound choices, colors, fonts used, etc.

I’m finding there are some details that I’m not sure where to place. Things like: expressions, positions, gestures, and the like. Those feel much more scene-specific than project-specific. Maybe I should google some more animation-specific storyboards to get some ideas.

Next, I’m going to take this storyboard that I’ve created and give it a test drive at work. Even taking our most simplest course and reverse storyboarding it should give me some more tangible, “real-to-me” experience that will help me adopt this into my processes more quickly. I can imagine that exercise will also raise more questions to be investigated and solutions to be adopted/adapted.

Arise! Go forth and storyboard!

References

Jones, B. (n.d.). Storyboard Your Elearning Projects. https://elearningart.com/development/storyboard/.