Professor: Rick Barry

Exercise: Storyboarding & Storytelling

The objective of this workshop is to demonstrate...
a- that narrative and storytelling is largely about the order of events.
b- that the order of events (or scenes) effects the dynamics of a story or narrative.
c- that an author's intentions may be interpreted differently by others
d- that a chronological ordering of events may or may not create the most effective narrative.
e- that experimenting with order can result in pleasant surprises.

Students are required to write a short story that they might like to animate in the future. After the story is read to, and critiqued by, the class, it is refined by the student author. The authors are then required to create a preliminary storyboard rendered on a perforated storyboard pad.

Each storyboard is shown one at a time, by laying out the separated panels in the order intended by the author. A student other than the author is asked to try to "tell" the story based solely on what they see in each panel, and the sequence of the arranged panels. When the student is finished telling the story as best they can, the author is asked whether this was told correctly or not. The value of this part of the exercise is to demonstrate that what may seem clear to the author may be interpreted differently by others. Some interpretations may be satisfying to the author, but others may be displeasing. The author may wish to bear this in mind when refining his/her storyboard.

In the next activity, the instructor re-arranges all of the storyboard panels so that they are no longer in the same order, and are randomly scattered. All of the students are asked to work together to re-order the panels into a narrative, but in such a way that it changes the dynamics of the narrative. The students are encouraged to take chances if they're uncertain whether a reordering will "work" or not. Another student is then asked to "tell" the story that resulted from the reordering. After this, the students may make modifications to that ordering if they wish, and the reordered story is "told" again by another student.

In the final activity, the original author is asked to re-establish his/her original narrative from the panels. The entire class is then given the opportunity to suggest any reordering of panels that might improve that narrative. Finally, the class discusses the results of the various orderings, which resulting narratives they found to be most successful, and why.

 

Dream Hunter
by Lisa DiPaula