Storyboarding

A storyboard in a visual plan of how you are going to show and tell your multimodal story.  Storyboards help us to visualise the completed text and to organise how we can use the resources we have to communicate our ideas clearly. A storyboard helps us to remember that we need to balance all the sources of information coming through each mode (print, visual and audio) and how they work together to contribute to the storytelling.  The different sources of  information need to work with the other information and not be redundant.

A storyboard is a simple sequence of cells and each is about one shot or page. Here you plan what will be seen and how it will be seen, what will be heard and how and when. If there is any written text, this shows what that is and where it will be placed. Arrows or notes might be added to describe character and camera movement within the shot. Drawing inside the cell shows where the camera is positioned in relation to the subject in the shot, and shows camera angle (high, low or eye level) and camera distance (wide shot, a mid shot or a close-up). The drawing is in perspective, so a close-up would fill the cell.