Self-Evaluation Criteria for a Storyboard Assignment

Storyboards visually lay out a plan for a video so that the plan can be revised and improved. Keep in mind then that a storyboard can be evaluated on two levels:

2. By how well it communicates the logic of the video’s proposed design. If the designer has a fantastic idea for a video, but the storyboard doesn’t communicate that plan well, the storyboard hasn’t achieved its purpose. No one else can approve the plan, others on the design team who might help implement it will not know what to do, and the design team as a whole cannot make useful improvements to the proposed video design.
3. As the actual plan of the video. If the storyboard is well enough designed that the video’s plan is easy to follow, the design team can begin looking for places to make fruitful revisions to the video’s design. For example, such revisions might involve the video’s focus, organization, pacing, combination of multimodal elements, choice of images, etc.

The questions below are meant to help you consider both aspects of your storyboard: how well it communicates the plan and how the plan itself might be revised. In each set of questions, concerns for clarity are addressed in the first bullet point or two; the rest are concerned with the design of the plan itself.

Who is the intended audience(s) of the proposed video and of the storyboard?

• Who is the intended audience for the storyboard? What purposes does this particular storyboard most serve: getting the design approved, eliciting feedback from others, helping collaborators work together on this project, providing a “rough draft” of the video plan primarily for the designer? How does the storyboard help meet the needs of its intended audiences?
• Who seems to be the intended audience of the proposed video, and what is this video’s primary purpose? How does the video’s design take these into account?

What seems to be the message and conceptual grounding of the planned project?

• What is the overall argument, or message, of the proposed video? How well could outside readers understand this message, based on the storyboard?
• How does the storyboard communicate the most important concepts or ideas in this project? Where does the storyboard best communicate these concepts, and where might the storyboard make the ideas that inform the video clearer or more developed?

How does the order of takes and scenes seem to contribute to the planned message?

• How well, based on the storyboard, could someone other than the storyboard designer understand the way scenes will be developed? Do some seem more or less important to the overall message? Where might an idea be developed more, or developed differently? Do any slides seem potentially superfluous?
• In short, how are ideas linked, and why does the order of ideas matter? For example, what if you shifted the order of some scenes, or of frames within scenes? How might that affect the overall message, the coherence of key ideas, or the effect on viewers?
• How does the planned opening set up the rest of the video? Based on the opening alone, what kind of expectations would you have for what follows? How hooked would you be as a viewer? How does the rest of the storyboard build on this opening?
• If you looked at just the plan for the conclusion, what would you remember about the video? How do you think these concluding images and ideas will influence viewers’ “takeaway” from the video? What makes the conclusion forceful?

What is the relationship among the visuals, audio, and text (spoken or written)?

• How does the storyboard represent the relationship among these elements (image, speaking, writing, music and sound effects)? How easily can readers see, at a glance, how each of these elements are working in each major part of the storyboard? For example, does the storyboard just explain the image or the voice-over narration, or does it also identify any music, audio effects, written text, camera movement, or timing of the shot/scene?
• Overall, how do the relationships among these elements contribute to the video’s message/argument?
• How might they contribute to viewers’ overall experience (e.g. tone and mood, recognition of themes, sense of relationship to the subject matter)?
• Where do the visual, aural, and textual elements seem planned so as to complement one another especially well?
• Where might the storyboard, and the proposed video, get more mileage out of a sequence by making greater use of one or more of these elements?

What roles do the film’s pacing and transitions play in its overall message?

• Based on the storyboard, how easy is it to get a sense of the overall pacing of the video? How might the reasoning for this pacing need to be explained to the storyboard’s audience?
• How do the planned transitions contribute to the overall message?
• How does the plan’s use of camera angles and movement (panning, zooming, etc.) contribute to the intended effect?
• How do transitions and camera use complement the overall pacing of the video and its intended effects?