Storyboarding
A storyboard is a linear sequence of sketches created in order to display a story. It is mainly used in film or animation to map out the shot sequence before it is filmed or created. In UX, storyboarding can be used as a tool to visually predict and explore a user’s experience with a product. Storytelling matters in design for many reasons. For one, it ensures the design approach is human-centered. Storyboarding puts people at the heart of the design. Another reason is that it forces thinking about user flow, allowing designers to see the product similarly to the users. Storyboarding also helps to prioritize what’s important. In addition to these benefits, it can allow for the “pitch and critique” method, allowing the idea to be critiqued by team members. Lastly, it allows simpler iteration, since the ideas are quick and rough, they can be shot down and recreated easily. In order to create a storyboard, you need to start by creating blank slides, then adding your script, and finally, sketching the story. For those without a lot of experience storyboarding, it may be easier to start with plain text and connect the ideas through arrows. Some important things to keep in mind when creating a storyboard are to show instead of telling, be cinematic, and make sure it is logical and coherent. Each story shows also contains characters, a scene, plot, and narrative. In order to make it powerful, the story should have clarity, authenticity, simplicity, and emotion.
My storyboarding process for these 3 stories happened after a process of ideation. I began by generating a list of story ideas. The original list was quite basic and consisted of average ideas that are quite common in stories. As I began to generate ideas more and more, the more novel my ideas became. Out of this came unique ideas, such as too much time travel causing a man to see the past and present at the same time, or other ideas such as the Rainbow Hunters. In order to execute the three ideas I chose to storyboard, I first sketched each of them in my notebook. I explored different stories with different amounts of frames and tried to give each story the proper amount of frames it either needed to did not need. The more I drew, the more creative my shots became. They went from all long shots to close-ups and POVs. Once I knew what I wanted in each frame of my story, I began to sketch out the final. Once I had a rough sketch, I started searching for references for things, such as the horse. I rode horses for eight years, but never in my life have I attempted to draw one. The references were quite helpful in obtaining the correct posture for the running horse. These complicated creatures and my now peaked interested in drawing them, led to the ending of Rainbow Hunters, which I ended up changing after completing the horse story. The most important thing I learned from this process is to give it time. My stories kept changing and evolving the more I thought about them and attempted to create them.
Sources:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/10/storyboarding-ux-design/
