To practice rapid storyboarding animation for communicating high level use case scenarios to clients.
Using informal animation to illustrate an idea or a concept is a powerful technique that is especially useful in the early prototyping phases of application development. While a commercial tool, such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft PowerPoint, may enable its users to create relatively sophisticated animations, their animation interface can be quite cumbersome for a designer who wishes to quickly sketch out an initial prototype version of an animation.
To reflect on storyboarding methods and what their relative strengths are.
This assignment is meant to inspire your creativity, flex your design muscles,
and give you a chance share your own designs in class. The assignments are meant to be
lightweight and fun.
Assignment
K-Sketch, an open source animation program created by Richard Davis enables novices to easily create informal
animations from sketches.
You will need a Windows PC to use K-Sketch. A tablet PC is ideal.
Prototype the storyboard for your project using K-Sketch
You animation should be between 1 and 4 minutes
It should have minimal text
It should be understandable by anyone in our class who knows what your project is.
Do not worry too much about polishing the “look” of your sketches, especially if you feel you are not a good “artist”. Instead focus on conveying the concept through the animation.
Export your animation file as a flash file
Lead a discussion of your idea
Present your group persona:
This should be a single slide or image accompanied by a story that you read about the group that you are working with. It should be specific, not abstract. It should be a story about their group interaction before you intervene with your design.
Present your animation
It should be a .flv file from K-Sketch
Digital documents can be uploaded to the dropbox or carried in on a flash drive.
Each person in the audience will fill out an anonymous questionairre like this:
How prepared was this group? 1 2 3 4 5
Would this group persona help guide the design process? 1 2 3 4 5
This group persona sounded like a real group? 1 2 3 4 5
This group persona was specific (not abstract) ? 1 2 3 4 5
The animation effectively conveyed the concept of the intervention (not a question about artistic ability)? 1 2 3 4 5
Grading
50 points effectiveness of flash animation
25 points persona
25 points presentation
15 bonus points if you create a second story board using a different technology and compare and contrast the two at the end of your presentation.
Thanks for James Landay for the idea for this assignment.