Learning Objective
Prepare storyboard content for your video.
Video is a visual medium, so hopefully you already have some visuals that you want to show within your video in mind. It should have been part of what made you decide to make the lesson a video in the first place.
It’s time to start organizing those thoughts — whether it’s to have them prepared before you begin recording your live-to-tape video or to begin collecting visual assets for post-production.
You may choose to do this directly within Google Slides, Powerpoint, or a similar tool — especially if you’re working from existing materials.
Alternatively, you may want to download the storyboarding template below to begin brainstorming from scratch.
If your video includes slides, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Make sure the slides are in widescreen format, so that they’ll fill the video frame
- 20-point font should be the minimum size you use
- Avoid lots of text, choosing rather to show a visual and speak what would be text on the slide
- Avoid reading text on a slide verbatim, but also don’t present completely unrelated information, as that taxes the viewer’s cognitive load
Practice, don’t rehearse. Just as you wouldn’t script out your entire lecture word-for-word ahead of time, don’t feel that your video’s dialogue or narration needs to be 100% prepared ahead of time.
Instead, practice going through the major points that you want to hit in the video. Preparation should be about getting comfortable with the material specific to that small video chunk, rather than “learning your lines.” A stilted, overly prepared presentation can be just as bad as an underprepared presentation.
Most importantly, remember why you chose to make the video in the first place. If you find yourself drifting away from any need for the visual materials, you should refocus or perhaps consider a different medium.
It’s okay. Not everything has to be a video.
Additionally, if you’re liking the pacing and content of your video while storyboarding, but the practiced timing is running well over six minutes, you should rethink your chunking to determine if the videos could be further subdivided.
Resources
SPS’s Creating Educational Video
Edutopia’s A 5-Step Guide to Making Your Own Instructional Videos
FAS: DIY Educational Video Script Template
Free stock images
Activity
- Make a copy of the storyboarding template.
- Fill out the dialogue column of the template with ideas for what you want to say in your video (it doesn’t need to be a full script).
- Brainstorm visuals that you might want to associate with those ideas in the right column.
