Storyboarding

As part of the course Machines of Knowledge, we were supposed to produce an animated video using the free browser-based software Powtoon.

The topic had to be related to the PBL session our team prepared earlier in this period. In our case, this topic was “Who owns the Narrative”, dealing with big internet players which hold dominant positions in information dissemination and processing through algorithmic filtering and other activities where data is stored and used to predict and influence users’ online (and offline) activities.

Quite early in the process, my team decided to produce a video about filter bubbles. These emerge through algorithmic processes based on users’ clicks, likes, views, etc., resulting in the display of information in users’ feeds, search results, etc. informed by their preferences, selected and filtered through algorithms. Filter bubbles assure people of their own opinions and give them the feeling that their views are widely accepted.

Prior to the storyboarding session, we had in week 5, we had to define our audience, our topic, our message as well as our goals in a brief. We decided to create a video for young people (teenagers between 12 and 18) and to inform them about the existence, problems and possible solutions about the filter bubble issue.

When we arrived at the meeting for storyboarding in late November, we moved tables and sat together in groups.

Since we already worked on our entire plot and even thought about visualization ideas, we were very well prepared and had written down a lot. This was a good starting point. However, we soon realized that it is not the easiest task to translate words into their visual representations.

At this point, an exercise proposed by our instructor helped to tackle this problem. Each team member used an A4 format white piece of paper and folded it so that it had 8 sections. When the paper was unfolded again, these sections were supposed to be the frames for 8 elements of our individual storyboards. Then the speed storyboarding started. We had roughly 5 minutes to bring our ideas to paper. Within very little time, each of us drew what she thought our video should look like, going from scene to scene.

When we finished this exercise, we compared our results. There were many similarities which are probably due to our previous work on the script. Nevertheless, different nuances and styles made us realize that every speed storyboard we created contained valuable and useful ideas. So, we picked some elements from each of these storyboards to integrate them into the general one.

Starting from individual perspectives and synthesizing them to create the draft for our joint project was a great way to acknowledge every team member’s ideas and to decide collectively about which of them we should incorporate for the video creation.

Big white sheets of paper were the foundation/background for our storyboard, smaller A5 format papers were used for drawing each scene, and green sticky notes served as captions supplementing the drawings with textual information. Working collaboratively, we developed a storyboard focused on our target audience (kids and teenagers). To convey our message most effectively we concentrated on simple shapes, two young characters our audience could identify with and examples for problems and solutions.

The result was still a little bit abstract with few details. But, given the overall time constraints of this session as well as the uncertainty of whether Powtoon would allow us to go into so much detail and realize everything we imaged on paper also on this platform, we were happy with the result.

All in all, this storyboarding session helped us a lot. It introduced us to another modality for our design process, gave us guidance on how to work with storyboards and made us realize how much work would be ahead of us. Translating a written script into visualizations raised awareness for details, technical feasibilities, possible contradictions between the narrator’s text and the scenes imagined, and added an important new structural layer to our project which assisted to be more goal-oriented and become more concrete.