PowerPoint is not necessarily a good choice for assembling the final product, however, as it’s a bit of a pain to add your audio narration. One easy way to develop a storyboard is to use PowerPoint, since you can include both an image and your planning notes on a single slide. I think when you see how the storyboard corresponds to the video, you’ll get a better sense for how helpful a storyboard is in the planning process, so that you don’t feel overwhelmed with a having a bunch of photos in iMovie and no idea what to do with them. Then take a look at the storyboard for each video.

To see a few examples of what a storyboard might look like and how it might help you plan, go to this Digital Storytelling workshop page and watch a few minutes of each video.

Digital Storytelling Storyboard Templates (PDF file from Jason Ohler).

Multimedia Storytelling: Storyboarding (from Knight Digital Media Center).

Storyboarding (from Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling).

For example, you may use Chapter 4 from the Digital Storytelling Cookbook or one of these resources: You should follow some set of established guidelines for preparing a storyboard, but you may choose which guidelines seem most fitting to your project and your style of planning. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to turn a rhetorical rationale for your project that explains the kinds of decisions you made in the drafting and revising process, based on what you thought would be most meaningful to your target audience.

But just as often happens with outlines, you may also find yourself diverging from the storyboard once you start developing the project, which is fine. You will prepare a storyboard to serve as a rough draft of your audiovisual or visual project, and your classmates will give you feedback on the storyboard.Īs with an outline for a text essay, the more effort you put into a storyboard, the easier you’ll find the process of actually composing your digital story. Storyboarding is a technique for planning a visual composition project (just as outlining is a technique for planning a project to be composed in alphabetic text). A storyboard is also an obvious method of planning an animation or comic book. You may want to use an outline to develop the essay portion of a CDS-style digital storytelling project, but in order to help you visualize which parts of the essay should line up with which visuals, you may want to use a storyboard instead.

If you’re planning to develop a project that conveys a message visually, whether it has an audio narration or not, the traditional method of outlining may not be sufficient for your planning stage.

Digital storyboard for writers