Crowell Learning publishing and business management all over again in Vietnam

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure OR the importance of storyboarding

Published on 30/09/08
by Collin

After nearly five hours of photographing and recording the NYC bocce finals in Staten Island, I spent another eight hours+ editing the material down to create this two and half minute long slideshow. It’s still too long, in my opinion. [Post edit: Class review of slideshow was positive, however, everyone, including myself, agreed that there was way too much use of the Ken Burns effect.]

The amount of time it took to plan and source the content vs. the amount of time to edit and design it was terribly disproportionate. The first lesson at Columbia was to “zoom with your feet” so to speak – to report closeup. The natural byproduct of that is a prodigious amount of content to edit through later. How to reconcile “zoom” with “speedy reporting?”

It seems obvious, but the trick to producing these digital stories quickly (probably any story), is knowing what you want to get in advance of getting it. I often lump too much time in the “zoom-first-edit-later” category. But the bottom line is: to be a professional new media journalist, you need to have a strong storyboard before going out to shoot. So storyboard.

The best tutorial I’ve found for storyboarding is at Knight Digital. It focuses on knowing what you want before going to get it. Quick tips to get started: Seek out a smaller anecdote in your story to tell the larger one. Try and find a beginning and responsibly predict an end to your story when you arrive. Find a character and chronicle their story. Just don’t point and shoot and hope for the best.

Once you get better at knowing how to look for the “story” in the article, the trick then becomes knowing what you can avoid or overlook. You speed up. You begin to produce not only quality work but you can also outproduce your competitor or deadline.

A short cut to embedding your SoundSlides slideshow in your blog
It should would make SoundSlides a whole lot more easier and probably, more popular if it could host the slideshows its users make. Without this hosting feature, it’s a pain in the ass to embed your slideshow in your blog or site. Knight Digital has a great tutorial on how to do this, but even still, this critical embed component is too hard to find.

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