Storyboarding and Pacing

As I read this week's assignments, I realized there was a common theme.  In the first weeks of this course we were exploring storytelling concepts and gathering raw materials for our stories.  This week we really started building our own stories, both for re-working a previous presentation, and for creating a new story in the form of a Pecha Kucha.  In both of these, I found myself with ideas, but no good way of combining them into a single unified whole that makes a point.  This is where storyboarding comes in.

The Digi Tales book has a great storyboarding template that I am using for both my Pecha Kucha and my re-formed presentation.  In both cases the storyboard is making me think of the key elements or points that I want to cover, then making me arrange them in a logical fashion.  This is not a step that I have always done, and I think many of my past presentations have suffered because of it.  It is too easy to end up with a series of disjointed slides that do not build to a point.  This lack of cohesion is one of the key elements of the "Death by PowerPoint" concept.  Individual slides that go on and on without really reinforcing a central theme.  We go so wrapped up in the bullet points on a particular slide that we do not see the whole.  This can even be true of a picture based presentation.  If the pictures do not flow, then the point is still lost.


Storyboarding forces you to look at the whole, to see the forest AND the trees.  Also important, storyboarding will help with the pacing of my presentations.  By creating the proper timing for the images, you can be sure that they build to a point at the proper moment, not too soon or too late.  Following the story arc concept that I learned in high school, the presentation should build towards it key theme for 2/3 or 3/4 of the presentation.  Then it should reach the climax and allow time for resolution, or in the case of a presentation, for the audience to digest and absorb you key points.  This is just a guideline of course, but the concept applies.  There are so many possibilities with images, quotes, video, graphs and other elements that you could add to a presentation, that a storyboard is almost a necessity to make sure that the audience will remember the "forest" of your presentation.  I have a great idea for a Pecha Kucha, but I will definitely need to storyboard it to see how I can deliver the point.