angles, figure out what costumes they need, design scenery, and make decisions about sound and lighting.
But there's a difference between a multimedia application and a movie: l
inearity. Movies are linear--one scene flows into another, the same way, every time you play the movie. Multimedia apps are often nonlinear--users may choose the path they take through the application. You could storyboard with pencil and paper, but charting multiple paths through an application will probably result in paper glut.
Multimedia developers use basically three types of tools to overcome paper's limitations: flow-charting and presentation software, simple storyboarding software, and tools that combine storyboarding with CASE-like functions.
Flowcharts and Presentations
The very simplest solution is a flowcharting tool (such as the one in CorelDraw). A flowchart enables you to lay out processes, decisions, and endpoints. The main problem is that there's no link between the flowchart and the content you're putting together. The flowchart can represent what's going to happen, but not how it's going to look. Therefore, it's most useful for the project manager and the
programmer who are trying to keep track of what the application is supposed to do when. By itself, a flowchart doesn't give an artist any sense of what graphics to create, nor does it give the writers or actors any sense of what to do.
You can solve some of these deficiencies with multimedia presentation tools, which enable you to not only organize the flow of the application but to start creating the application's look and feel. For example, Adobe Persuasion lets you create relationships between multimedia objects by assigning them to different layers of a single presentation slide. With Persuasion, you bring text files, graphical elements (e.g., TIFFs or BMPs), audio tracks (e.g., MIDI files or WAV files), and animation clips (e.g., MPEG or AVI files) together in a single slide. The slide consists of views overlaid on each other. When you run the presentation, Persuasion fires up the various media players--a QuickTime viewer or a MIDI synthesizer, for instance--to play all these elements simultaneous
ly.
Once you have thumbnails of what the main screens in your application are to look like, you can organize the content. You can even run a simple demo of the application. But there are two basic issues with this approach. First, presentation tools are usually best at
presenting
, not storyboarding. Consequently, they use templates and rules that work wonderfully for a presenter who drives the content, perhaps with occasional branches. A storyboard you create in a presentation tool will probably look more like a presentation than a storyboard. Second, you have little control over the individual elements in a presentation. For example, you typically cannot adjust the volume of an audio clip from within the presentation application. You'll have to adjust these functions in the individual players or content-building programs themselves.
Storyboard Software
You can use flowcharts and presentation tools to develop your storyboard, but they aren't specifically designed fo
r that. You should consider some of the new programs that vendors have developed specifically for multimedia storyboarding.
"All the storyboarding tools came out of linear thinking," says Paul Clatworthy, a partner at PowerProduction Software. "We developed StoryBoard Artist to handle a nonlinear format." StoryBoard Artist for the Mac uses clip art and stock characters that you place into a storyboard frame, then manipulate, for example, by rotating them to represent a certain camera angle. You set the flow of the application by linking each frame to its destination frames. "We designed a tool for directors who can't draw," quips Clatworthy.
StoryBoard Artist's stock-item construction methods are unique, but the idea of combining and flowing images together isn't. Programs such as Media Commander for Windows, HiJaak 95, and Image'N'Bits let you create thumbnails of each element and assign an appropriate label to each thumbnail.
These tools make it easier to track the different data types
that go into a multimedia application. Additionally, they allow you to create storyboard frames by dragging and dropping the thumbnail into a frame. Such tools typically use OLE and let you create OLE links from the presentation program to the data associated with the thumbnails. In that way, you might link a button on the screen with the playing of a video stream.
Tools for Authors
More sophisticated tools blur
the line between storyboarding and development. Storyboarding with such programs often results directly in an application. These products are also authoring tools and typically rely on an icon-based design language or a scripting language. For example, PowerProduction's Digital BoxOffice is a storyboard-to-code tool--CASE for producers and artists. BoxOffice enables you to create a storyboard, then use menus to make English-syntax scripts to link frames. When you're done storyboarding, you have a multimedia application.
Allen Communication's
Quest for Windows
also has strong tools for developing individual frames and associating frames. For example, you can toggle between a view showing the relationship between frames and a view showing all the elements of a particular frame. Quest is particularly good for developing computer-based training (CBT) applications, especially when you couple it with the company's Designer's Edge program. This $2995 package includes a comprehensive checklist that helps you analyze your project's needs, identify your audience, develop an overview, assemble your instructional elements, and put together your storyboard. Designer's Edge borders on CASE: As you work through the checklist, the program creates your app's structure--all you need to do is add the content.
Other high-end authoring-and-more programs include Avid's editing tools within its Real Impact program and AimTech's CBT Express for Windows. One of Real Impact's key features is Dial-a-Quality, which changes the quality of images by balanc
ing your distribution medium and system performance. It comes with a media library. CBT Express is frame-based and template-driven, and it enables you to create training applications quickly by using prefab backgrounds, buttons, and templates for just about every common CBT task (e.g., glossaries and tests). CBT Express has a big sibling called IconAuthor, which offers transition effects, sample applications, and database integration.
Database integration may seem an odd feature to add, but using a database as a central information repository can really ease development, especially when working on large projects. MicroMentor, a company that develops instructional multimedia applications, uses tools like the ones we've discussed but sometimes takes a different approach. Rather than pulling the multimedia pieces together in the application, developers, writers, and artists put them in a database, then write a Visual Basic application that pulls the files from the database.
During design, you use t
he database's forms to enter descriptions of the kinds of information you're going to need as well as how it's linked together. Then you can just generate reports for the different members of the project--for example, artists get a list of the graphics they need to produce. The team members go off and generate the content they need, and that, too, goes into the database. Then the programmer has to write a program to put it all together.
There are several reasons for creating an application this way. First, the database can generate reports tailored to each team member. Second, more programmers know Visual Basic than know scripting languages. Third, if you are creating a series of similar products, you can build one database and easily update the application to pull out slightly different material.
Looking for a Match
You can still do storyboarding with pencil and paper, but a computer-based tool will
make the job much easier
. If you simply need a way t
o quickly pull together different multimedia elements, a lower-end storyboarding tool might be all you need.
If you have to keep track of many data files, a tool that provides thumbnails and a way to archive the elements would be a good bet. If you're working on an interactive training presentation that requires handling lots of conditional branches and juggling many forms of multimedia data, a storyboarding tool that integrates tightly with the authoring software is essential.
WHERE TO FIND
Persuasion
Adobe Systems
1585 Charleston Rd.
Mountain View, CA 94039
Phone: (800) 833-6687 or (415) 961-4400
CBT Express, IconAuthor
AimTech Corp.
20 Trafalgar Sq., Suite 300
Nashua, NH 03063
Phone: (800) 289-2884 or (603) 883-0220
Internet:
http://www.aimtech.com
What's The Story?
