Storyboarding

Storyboarding isn't anything really new to me. In elementary school, I created very short stop motion animated Lego clips. In middle school, I created two animated music videos for a grade in my choir classes. Throughout high school I've had to plan and create giant posters for my MaST (Math and Science Technology) research. Heck, even for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that I dungeon master (aka the game master), I need to plan out the events that my players will interact with; or just completely ignore the entire plot with their stupidity.... The point is that I have had experience with storyboarding throughout my life.

Most of my storyboarding expertise comes from experimenting and playing around with ideas. After all, the best way to visualize your ideas is by drawing or writing them on a piece of paper. This way, you can see what needs to be changed or added to your overall concept. I'm not the only one who thinks this. According to James M. Higgins in his article, "Storyboard your way to success", he exclaims that, "Storyboarding is a structured exercise based on brainstorming. You can use it in all stages of the problem-solving process, but it's especially helpful for generating alternatives and choosing among them." By writing, drawing, or just planning out ideas, it can help elevate the creative process and work towards a better product. This is what I did when I first started to create my idea of the magazine layout. 

When we first started, we had to design our project. we had to plan out where all the pictures and text will go for each page. However, I did most of my planning on other papers before putting it down on the specific paper. Think of it as creating drafts for the draft. Things will change with each iteration of the project as I add or rewrite content. According to Higgins, "Storyboarding is flexible.... And it allows a group to generate a lot of ideas..."

After I created a few ideas, I talked with Bailey so that we could decide on an overall look to our magazines. We agreed with keeping things with circles in mind; because circles are the shape that makes things look friendly and kind, which is exactly what we want. Working with another person helped a lot. We were able to bounce ideas off of each other and come up with newer, and better, ones. 

I think the hardest part for both of us was deciding on the color scheme. Although I love to draw a lot, I am no artist. I suck when it comes to coloring and I don't know which colors go together. Unfortunately, Bailey is also not an artist. How did we work around this problem? Uh... We kind of just looked at other pet or animal related magazines and chose colors. We didn't copy the magazine's color scheme, we just got ideas from them. I think that will be our weakest point on our magazines though.

Other than that, Bailey and I made tons of progress in completing our concept. We now have an official name, "Claw Stars" and a basis for all the pages. We also have most of the fonts picked out and we even discussed where we were going to get our pictures and interviews for our magazines. It may not be completely finished, but the concept is very well put together. I think this is going to be great. 

Here is the storyboard for my four pages of my magazine:

 

Yeah... I know that it needs a lot more work, but I think this is a great first layout. I will put more details, such as what the pictures are going to be and article names, but that will be a bit later. For now, I need to work on getting pictures and interviews for the feature article.