Storyboarding life

I have always used storyboards to communicate my ideas and designs at work but I never knew or learnt the art of storyboarding. It might be because I am a visual person and I communicate better in pictures and words sometimes so the concept of storyboarding felt second nature.

Anyway, as I was thinking about my class on storyboarding this week, I was wondering how best to communicate this concept in my lecture. As I prepared my notes and material for class, a single phrase leapt out at me — a visual mind map. That was it. It was similar to doing a mind map for a paper or idea. That single phrase helped to unlock my flow and creativity to communicate this idea to my class.

Now, I must add that I presented a rather introductory lesson because I am not teaching film but my aim was to embed the idea in the learners that it was as simple as doodling. Take your idea from your mind and put it on paper. Visualise how you want your ad or campaign to look like and transpose those thoughts unto a sheet of paper by hand (first) and work from there.

Storyboarding is a visual or graphical representation of your idea for a film, movie, ad or campaign on paper in sequence.

It is amazing how much detail you can put into your storyboard and how you can get a feel for the shot even on paper. A lot of film directors use storyboards before shooting a movie because this helps them to cut down unnecessary errors, shoot by locations and make corrections on paper rather than post production.

I started to think of how seamless movie productions appear even before edits and wondered this art isn’t incorporated when we make plans for our lives. I do understand that a lot of people like to “go with the flow” and “see what happens” but I wonder how much richer our lives would be if we’d take a bit more time to plan. The closest concept I can think of this is the idea of vision boards. This is similar but storyboards seem to have more detail.

So, I’d leave you with the reminder I gave my students- always think about the call to action. My call-to-action to you is that you spend sometime planning and writing down what exactly you want, how you want to get there and take action.