STORYBOARDING "A RECIPE" What is a storyboard? It's a place to plan out your digital story in two dimensions. The first dimension is time: what happens first, next, and last. The second is of interaction: how does the voiceover (your story) interact with the images, how do visual transitions and effects help tie together the images, how does the voiceover interact with the musical soundtrack? Any element can interact with any other one, and the storyboard is the place to plan out the impact you intend to make on the audience. Since this is a tutorial, we'll sketch out a storyboard using only the images, voiceover, and soundtrack. An experienced digital storyteller would have some idea of what transitions and effects might be appropriate at the early storyboarding stage, but we'll leave that step for later. The tutorial "A Recipe" is only about 45 seconds long, enough time to bring to life an 8-line poem written by a father for his son. The images consist of a title and credits, eight photographs of Massimo, one of his paintings, and a short video clip. The soundtrack will be two snippets of jazz: one slow, a jazz piano, the other a snappy jazz combo finish. Here's how the storyboard would be laid out: Notice how few words of the voiceover are under each picture. Each six-word line takes about three seconds to speak. And three seconds is about the ideal length for any still image to appear on the screen. Too short, and it's hard for the viewer to recognize what's being shown; too long, and boredom sets in. If you're laying out your storyboard and find lines and lines of text under any one picture, rethink your script or your images. Can the script be cut down and the image left to speak the missing words? If the text remains long, can more than one image illustrate the essential words? You may also want to use some effects to extend the viewer's interest in a single still image, and we'll show you some tools to do that later in the tutorial. But for now, try to use the best effect of all: letting images speak for themselves, and using words to say the rest. Some ways to make your storyboard Get a piece of posterboard, preferably large (22” x 17”), and a packet of Post-it notes. Sort out the image material you plan to use and label each of the Post-its with the name and, if needed, a phrase describing the image. Create 5 or 6 rows horizontally across your posterboard, leaving room for writing text below each post-it. Fill in the text of your script in pencil, and place the appropriate images above the appropriate words. The Post-its will allow you to move things around or take them out as need be, and you can erase the text if you want to move it around. Instead of labeling Post-its with the name of each image, you could go to a copy place and photocopy your photos. (Shrink them a bit.) Tape or glue your copied images to the Post-its, and lay out your storyboard. The advantage here is that, just as on the computer, you can easily move things around. If you’d like to work on a smaller page, download our storyboard template and use the procedure described in (1). If you know desktop publishing software like Adobe’s Pagemaker or Quark Express, and you're familiar with how to scan images, you can make your storyboard right on the computer. Any of these methods will work. Do whatever is convenient and easy for you. A storyboard will speed your work in many ways. It will show you where your voiceover should be cut before you record, and it will show you that you have too few or two many images planned before you scan. With your storyboard in hand, it's time to digitize your materials.