Information Literacy 2.0--Part 3: Storyboarding

Several times in the past couple years I’ve been asked to “storyboard” in an instructional technology workshop. Storyboarding is the process of sketching (with pencil and paper or by pasting images) the flow of content in a sequenced presentation such as a video or PowerPoint slideshow. It’s essentially a way to represent how you plan to juxtapose multiple types of content and supporting materials such as images, text, and audio in one unified outline.

You don’t have to be a great artist to create a storyboard. Stick figures work just fine.
Or if you’re too artistically challenged even for stick figures, you can always buy a storyboarding software program.

In 21 years of formal schooling, the only place I ever encountered storyboarding was on TV or in the movies. Glamorous portrayals of Madison Avenue “ad men” or the comic Darrin in Bewitched come to mind.

While the artistic demands of storyboarding are minimal, the intellectual demands are numerous and complex. Among possible others, they include knowing how to . . .

• Present your story, argument or other type of message on a narrative timeline
• Simultaneously arrange image, audio and text on the same timeline
• Take into account time duration as a dimension of design, recognizing that images, text and audio all introduce their own timing factors
• Meet audience needs and expectations for multiple streams of media (e.g., Will they know that word? Care about that argument? Recognize that visual symbol? Relate to that narrator’s apparent age/gender/ethnicity? Not be put-off by that background music?)

In my own education, I cannot remember being challenged by any assignments involving multiple streams of media more complex than placing a table of numbers in a paper and then making sure the narrative referred to it accurately and without too much redundancy. I can’t remember having to think about the flow of time beyond perhaps adding “{pause}” to the script of a skit or speech in high school. Having to develop arguments that were both logical and appropriately pitched to a particular audience was complex enough without any additional layers of consideration concerning the integration of visual and audio dimensions. I am stunned when I think about the complexity of information literacy demands that new (or newly popularized) technologies place on us and our student. Even more stunning is that the list above doesn't even include any of the technological demands like learning how to splice and dub audio and video tracks or choose a readable font for subtitles!

A couple resources about storyboarding:
Storyboards
Laurie Brooker's Film Storyboard