In chapter 8 of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, author and Center for Digital Storytelling co-founder Joe Lambert discusses the importance of storyboarding as a visual tool to organize a digital story. Having worked in television production myself, I’ve found that storyboarding is useful when trying to present a new client with a unique proposal. As Lambert says, “The art of film storyboarding has taught anyone working on a story (from mega-movies to digital stories) one important lesson: planning on paper will save the enormous expense of time, energy, and money when it comes time to produce your work” (p.97).
Lambert illustrates this point by giving a scenario of a man name Rick, who wanted to create a photo montage for his parents’ 40th anniversary. Rick had a lot of ambition, a ton of content, but very little production planning. In the end, the final project was a disappointment. I found this scenario interesting because I completed a similar project last August for my parents who celebrated their 50th anniversary. It took months to gather all the photographs, weeks to choose the best visual sequence and background music, and hours to ultimately decide on the final cut. Plus, I decided to show the 15-minute presentation to my parents to make sure no particular family member had been omitted. In the end, my family was very impressed by my work.
The 50th anniversary photo montage would not have been possible without a significant amount of planning. In creating digital stories, storyboarding can help a digital author in planning available content, such as photos, video, narration, music and text. Lambert gives an example, which is part of a tutorial called MomnotMom, that allow a digital storyteller to visualize the various elements that will be incorporated into a project. In many ways, it looks similar to a timeline one would find in a video editing application such as WeVideo, iMovie, or Adobe Premiere. In many ways, creating a storyboard is like creating a rough “off-line” edit of a multimedia project without actually using an edit software. One just needs to get a piece of posterboard, Post-it notes and a Sharpie marker. Personally, I would recommend a larger canvas to visualize the story, like a whiteboard in a conference room or classroom (if available).
Lambert concludes the chapter with a digital storytelling example entitled “Ray’s Story.” Unfortunately, there was no mention to where this digital story could be found online. I attempted to do a Google search using the keywords “StoryCenter” and “Ray’s Story”, but there were no clear results. Still, I was intrigued by Lambert’s comments of how the StoryCenter facilitators collaborated with Ray to help create his story about growing up in West Baltimore. Lambert mentions the term “story circle” as a way of the facilitators helping Ray shape the details of his story. He comments how “It’s a matter of listening hard to what the photos are saying, to what’s in between what the storyteller is telling you, in order to find the questions that will help someone discover their insight and their voice” (p.104).
Overall, I’ve been intrigued by what Joe Lambert and his StoryCenter colleagues had implemented to facilitate digital storytelling. Looking forward to the next chapter.