create a visual storyboard for a narrative involving a couple stranded on a road trip. The following skills and knowledge are essential to success in your professional life beyond this course:
Skills:
• Selecting and arranging images that express the plot, theme and characters in the story.
Knowledge:
• Selecting images that communicate emotions.
• Selecting images that express action.
• Selecting images that express the passage of time.
• Selecting images that express intangibles, such as hunger.
Task:
Create a visual storyboard expressing what happens to a couple stranded on a road trip. Select and arrange images that complete the story from the point where the opening narration leaves off. Do not storyboard the opening narration. All steps are highly unique to your specific project, therefore problem-solving and critical thinking skills are necessary.
• Please view LinkedIn Learning: “Learning Graphic Novel Storyboarding” with Ben Bishop and “The Storyboard Artist’s Life” with Darin McGowan, Links to an external site. “Psycho Shower Scene Storyboard
• Actions
• ” and “Comics—Not Just for Laughs Links to an external site.,” before starting this project.
• Read the paragraph below. It sets the stage for you to complete the story using a visual storyboard—a sequence of still images deliberately arranged to represent the events of a story to be filmed, in the order they will be finally edited and screened; for example, as in Saul Bass’s Psycho Shower Scene Storyboard.
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o Memorial Day—the unofficial start of summer. John and Linda had been anticipating the time off from work. John is a teacher and Linda is a bank teller. They live in Miami. They had made plans to visit Linda’s mom in Orlando and maybe go to Disney World or Universal Studios during the three-day weekend. On Thursday night, they had packed their bags for a three-day excursion, and as soon as they got off from work on Friday afternoon, they were on the road. It was a trip they had made many times before, but this time it would be different. Sawgrass fires forced I-95 and the Turnpike to shut down for long stretches. They had to get off the main highway and seek alternative routes. With heavier than usual traffic on a holiday weekend, what was normally a four-hour trip extended late into the night. Then the car’s left front tire blew out, and they had to pull over in an unfamiliar town. Both John and Linda’s cell phones were not working…
• Write an outline expressing what will happen to John and Linda From the point where the narration leaves off – this opening narration will not be storyboarded. Also, do not invent a different opening situation (please continue the story of the stranded couple).
• The goal of the story is to create an emotional experience for the audience by identifying with the main characters by creating empathy. Be sure to include emotions and experiences that might be familiar to the audience—mostly young adults in college, like yourself.
• Conflict occurs when the main characters encounter, and must overcome, obstacles. The story winds down after all the conflicts are resolved. In the movies, the guy and girl live happily ever after—The End. Make your story resolve the conflicts in the plot—or not, the couple might be unable to reach their destination due to unforeseen circumstances. Don’t end the story abruptly after the required number of slides (24), but let the audience understand what happens to them.
• Think about how you can reveal time, wind, or hunger—things that cannot be naturally shown in visual form.
• Search Unsplash.com, Pexels.com, Google Images, flickr.com, iStockPhoto.com, or other online sources of photographs for images to complete the story. Alternatively, your storyboard may be hand-drawn (as was Saul Bass’s storyboard for Psycho), then digitized. As another alternative, you may stage some of the scenes of the story with your friends, then photograph with a digital or mobile phone camera (at medium or 1024×768 resolution—Not higher). In any case, import the images to PowerPoint, where they are to be arranged in sequence to express the details of the story.
• The story must make sense visually, without the use of verbal messages.
• You must show a sequence of events—for example, a sunset to symbolize day turning into night, or people walking to signify that they are going somewhere. Show all the steps; don’t abbreviate anything. For example, don’t just show the couple walking through the woods, and then suddenly they’re in their hotel room. Instead, take time to flesh out all the steps, showing a hotel exterior, then an interior of the hotel lobby, the couple talking to a desk clerk, and the bellhop taking them to their room. This is only an example. Your story might not even involve the couple making it to a hotel room. The point is to not skip any steps.
• Select and arrange images that express the subtle nuances of your story’s events literally and unambiguously. Symbolic images, such as clip art, logos, or icons (like a lightbulb expressing a bright idea) are not allowed!!! Don’t use smiley faces, the “no” symbol (a red circle with a diagonal red bar through it, used in “no smoking” and in road signs), or other symbolic images. Don’t use cartoons.
• The first slide must contain the following information: