Creating Storyboards For Flash Animations

Why would a project manager or business analyst have to have to know how to build a storyboard for a Flash animation? You may possibly argue that this is the dominion of a graphic designer or animator, and you would be ideal. But applying storyboards is an helpful process for figuring out the expense of an animation, and absolutely budgeting considerations are a duty of a project manager.

To commence with, we should really have some type of definition of what a storyboard is. At the most simple level, a storyboard is a series of images which map out the sequence of an film or animation. It is extensively accepted that a functional specification must be build just before any coding happens, so why would not you use some type of organizing technique just before generating a Flash animation?

Just before you say "but I cannot draw. Final time I drew a stick figure, men and women believed it was a potato", you want not be concerned. Artistic ability is not as critical as you may possibly feel, sequence is of higher significance (e.g. very first, a lot of camera flashes go off, then the limousine drives up, and so on).

The format I use for a storyboard is incredibly simple. This is intentional considering that it demands to be understood by each graphic designers and clientele.

The structure is as follows:

Document Objective - this is for the advantage of any one selecting up the document for the 1st time. It really is a short statement of what the document is around. For instance; this document presents a storyboard for the animation appearing on the Blue Widgets web-site. The idea is to present a series of illustrations in order to help visualize the sequence of the interactive animation.

The Animation - this is exactly where you say what's going to happen in the animation, and in what order. It really is also exactly where the 'illustration panels' appear, practically nothing fancy is expected, its adequate to place in labeled squares or circles (e.g. a circle with 'client logo' in it, the text 'tag-line', a box with 'button 1' in it, and so forth).

Under the illustration panel will be a series of bullet factors. These describe what's taking place in this unique aspect of the animation. This is why you label the shapes in the panel, so you have a thing to refer back to, for example; 'the client logo will fade-in gradually', or 'the bouncy ball will move across the screen from left to proper'.

The bullet things are exactly where the real detail goes, therefore why artistic capabilities are not such a significant requirement for this style of storyboard (leave the artistic stuff to the authorities). The extra detail that goes in here the improved. You require to build statements around what occurs after the user interacts with specific components of the animation (e.g. once the user areas their mouse more than the client logo, a yellow glow seems about it and a pleasant chime sound plays once). Timing, or saying how extended points will go for is significant here (e.g. the slogan text will fade-in more than a period of 1.five seconds). This is also a excellent put to specify what photos, URLs or text will be employed on the panel (e.g. once the user clicks the client logo, they will be taken to index.aspx).

As the saying goes, 'the devil is in the detail', and this is exactly where the bullet factors come in handy, they serve as an vital tool for clarifying what the animation is incredibly meant to be. The bullet factors are created to build discussion (e.g. client: "we do not need to have a male model in our banner, our target industry is female, they are the ones that tend to acquire our lipstick").

Do not neglect to say what the state of the animation will be after it initially loads up, will there be a progress metre considering that the animation is required to be significant? What will the initial banner image be? Will any buttons be highlighted by default?

Appendix - this is the Final section of the storyboard document. It can include a thing else which you consider desires to be documented (e.g. screenshots, mockups, JPEGs to be employed for reference purposes, and so forth). The 2 fundamental sections I put in the Appendix are: Assistance Files, and Technical Notes / Non-demands. The Help Files section is truly a ZIP archive embedded inside the MS Word document. The ZIP file consists of any relevant graphics files intended to be utilised with the animation. The advantage of packaging these files with each other is that the most up-to-date graphics travel with the storyboard document itself. This is specifically efficient after the document requires to be emailed to off-website contractors. Of course, this only performs if the ZIP archive is Beneath two-three MB in size.

The Technical Notes / Non-desires section is exactly where you say what you happen to be not going to do. For example; there will be no sound-effects or music made use of with the animation, no specific effects will be utilized inside the animation other then fade-in/fade-out, the animation will run for no longer then 30 seconds. In addition, you may well need to have to give specific guidelines which are relevant only to the Flash developer, such as: the completed animation need to be no much more then 1 MB in size, all text appearing in the animation need to be retrieved from a XML file, and so forth.

A large aspect of developing a storyboard is assisting a client translate what is in their head into some thing much more tangible. Failing to do so may well outcome in an iterative cycle which isn't only expensive, but unnecessarily time consuming.

Louis Marshall, Project Manager

My tech weblog: pm4web.blogspot.com.