Communicorps :: Learning :: By Definition

Storyboarding

Storyboarding was first employed as a creative tool in early cinema, and made famous by Walt Disney as early as 1928. He used the technique to plan his many cartoons and features. It has since become an essential part of most movie and television productions. Storyboards are thoughts and actions that are written on cards or pieces of paper then laid out on a wall or board. A storyboard allows new thoughts to be inserted and discarded as the story or project progresses.

Storyboarding is both a creativity tool and an organizational tool. Generally storyboarding is concerned with a work-in-progress versus a complete idea. The organizational component is really less important than the creative element. At the same time it provides a structure and order to thoughts and ideas, it also allows for change through simple rearrangement as the idea becomes more fully developed.

Start your storyboard by writing separate ideas on individual cards, arrangement in order on a wall or display board, and make changes and additions as you go--storyboarding is really quite simple. There are many advantages to the storyboarding process including:

Serving as a common point of reference, enabling other team members to say, 'Yes, that is what I meant', or 'No, we've a problem here'.
Bringing focus on the total content of the program. Problems may be spotted in the storyboard which would have proven costly to correct at a later date.
Omissions may be spotted as a result of producing the storyboard.
A detailed storyboard can save time in creating a project.
Advanced planning can result in a storyboard "template" from which to work, speeding along planning in other areas.

Action Ideas.

Storyboarding is a popular management told to faciliate the creative-thinking process and can be likened to taking your thoughts and the thoughts of others and spreading them out on a wall as you work on a project or solve a problem.
When you put ideas up on storyboards, you begin to see interconnections, how one idea relates to another, and how all the pieces come together. Once the ideas start flowing, those working with the storyboard will become immersed in the problem. People will "piggyback" onto ideas.
Start with a topic card, and under the topic card place header cards containing general points, categories, considerations, etc that will come up. Under the header cards you will put sub-heading cards containing the ideas that fall under each header. They're the details ideas generated in the creative-thinking session, ideas that develop or support the headers.