Why would a task manager or business analyst need to know how to make a storyboard for a Flash animation? You could debate that this is the territory of a graphic designer or animator, and you would be correct. But applying storyboards is an efficient method for finding out the price of an animation, and surely budgeting considerations are a duty of a task manager.
In the first place, we should have some sort of definition of what a storyboard is. At the most basic stage, a storyboard is a series of images which map out the chronological sequence of an movie or animation. It’s wide accepted that a working specification should be developed before any coding takes place, so why wouldn’t you use some kind of designing process prior to creating a Flash animation?
Before you say “but I can’t draw. Last time I drew a stick man, people guessed it was a spud”, you need not concern. Artistic skill isn’t as vital as you may think, sequence is of greater implication (e.g. first, many camera photoflashes goes off and then the limousine approaches, etc).
The formatting I use for a storyboard is really basic. This is intentional because it needs to be realized by both graphic designers and customers.
The construction is as follows:
Document Purpose – this is for the gain of anybody seeing the document for the first time. It’s a short instruction of what the document is about. For example; this document demonstrates a storyboard for the animation appearing on the Blue Widgets website. The thought is to show a series of illustrations in order to help see the sequence of the interactive animation.
The Animation – this is where you say well occur in the animation, and in what order. It’s also where the ‘illustration panels’ appear, nothing fancy is needed, its adequate to put in named squares or circles (e.g. a circle with ‘client logo’ in it, the text ‘tag-line’, a box with ‘button 1′ in it, etc).
Beneath the illustration panel will be a series of bullet points. These explains what is going on in this specific part of the animation. This is why you label the figures in the panel, so you have something to relate back to, for example; ‘the client logo will fade-in step by step’, or ‘the bouncy ball will go across the screen from left to right’.
The bullet points are where the factual detail goes, thus why artistic skills aren’t such a big requirement for this style of storyboard (leave the artistic stuff to the experts). The more detail that goes into here the better. You wish to make instructions about what goes on when the user acts with special elements of the animation (e.g. if the user directs their mouse above the client logo, a yellow glowing comes out around it and a nice bell audio plays one time). Timing, or stating how long things will go for is crucial here (e.g. the motto text will fade-in over a time period of 1.5 secs). This is as well a good place to determine what pictures, URLs or text will be utilized on the panel (e.g. if the user clicks the customer logo, they will be taken to index.html).
Bullet points are handy, they assist as an crucial instrument for clearing up what the animation is actually intended to be. The bullet points are planned to give discussion (e.g. client: “we don’t need a male poser in our banner, our target area is female, they’re the ones that lean to purchase our lip rouge”).
Don’t forget to say what the state of the animation will be when it for the first time loads up, will there be a progress meter as the animation is anticipated to be big? What will the initial banner picture be? Will any buttons be spotlit by default?
Appendix – this is the final part of the storyboard document. It can hold anything else which you believe wants to be documented (e.g. screenshots, mockups, JPEGs to be applied for reference purposes, etc). The 2 standard parts I put in the Appendix are: Support Files, and Technical Remarks / Non-essentials. The Support Files part is really a ZIP archive embedded inside the MS Word document. The ZIP file holds any applicable artwork files meant to be utilized with the animation. The benefit of packaging these files together is that the most up-to-date artwork move with the storyboard document itself. This is particularly useful as the document requires to be emailed to off-site contractors. Naturally, this just works if the ZIP archive is under 2-3 MB in size.
The Technical Notes / Non-essentials part is where you state what you’re not going to do. For example; there will be no sound-effects or music utilized with the animation, no effects will be applied inside the animation other then fade-in/fade-out, the animation will run no more then thirty seconds. In addition, you might wish to give particular directions which are applicable only to the Flash programmer, such as: the finished animation should be no more then 1 MB in size, all text appearing in the animation ought to be retrieved from a XML file, etc.
A large portion of producing a storyboard is assisting a client understand what’s in their head into something more touchable. Failing to do so could lead in an iterative cycle which is not simply costly, but unnecessary time consuming.