Storyboards are used to organize a story and list its key elements. A transmedia narrative can contain a combination of video, text, still photos, audio, graphics and interactivity presented in a nonlinear format. The first step in storyboarding a transmedia narrative is to divide the story into logical, nonlinear parts. These parts might be based on characters, settings, events, or other aspects of the story. Pratten’s LowLifes is an example of how a transmedia project can be divided into logical parts based on characters. The synopsis lays out the basic premise of the story:

Larry Hayes is a San Francisco homicide detective with a drug addiction.

He has a dead informant, an ex-wife fighting for custody of their daughter, and a private eye hired to dig the dirt on him. (Pratten, Transmedia Story Development, 2010)

Pratten goes on to note that LowLifes involves one story seen from three perspectives and told over three media platforms.

The next step is to divide the content of the story among the media that will be used for the transmedia narrative. Different media have different strengths (Stevens, 2011):

  • Video:  The best medium for depicting action is video. It can be used to take the users to a setting that is central to the story or hear and see characters that play important roles in the story.
  • Still Photographs and Images: Strong emotions, particular moods, or important points in the story are best expressed with still photographs and images. They are often more dramatic than video and provide the user with time to examine the image in detail. Panoramic or 360-degree images can immerse a user in a story setting. Images also allow users to control the pace at which they view information (horizontal information cascade). Digital technology is blurring the boundary between photography and computer-generated images that can be photo-realistic in quality. When combined with audio, still photographs and images can highlight emotions.
  • Graphics: Still and animated graphics can show how things work (e.g. an animated diagram of the gears in a machine) and go where cameras can’t (e.g. inside molecules or into space). At times the line between still photographs/images and graphics can become blurred.
  • Audio: Good audio can make video and still photographs/images more intense and real. Poor quality audio, on the other hand, detracts from video and still photographs/images. Audio should not be used alone.
  • Text: A description of the history of something in the story, first-person accounts of an event, and a process description can all use text to convey information. Text will often be combined with still photographs/images and graphics and will also be used for “what’s left when you can’t convey the information with photos, video, audio, or graphics” (Stevens, 2011)

In Pratten’s LowLifes, Detective Larry Hayes’ perspective is told in a novella, private eye Lauren Ortega’s in a series of web videos, and ex-wife Jen Hayes’ in a blog.

The information presented with each medium should be complementary, not redundant. Some overlap among different media can be useful as a way to invite users to move from one medium to another and help orient users after they make the jump to a new medium. This overlap should be brief and provide users with just enough information to make a cognitive connection between the story elements on both sides of the jump.

A wide variety of templates are used for storyboarding content. The specific format doesn’t matter, as long as the template provides enough room to document the various elements associated with a scene from the narrative.