Storyboarding with Google Slides
In order to properly design a motion graphic video you have to storyboard it first so a client knows exactly what they’re getting before you start to animate. “A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. – Wikipedia”. So now we know the definition, how exactly does one do this effectively?
What to Use?
After my initial struggles with the idea and concept of storyboarding a video, I knew the best route for me wouldn’t be to illustrate with a pencil into 9 tiny boxes on a piece of paper, scan multiple pieces of paper, then import into Photoshop. That seemed a bit convoluted, knowing most people wouldn’t look at my sketches and say, “That’s exactly how I want it to look.” Obviously my sketch wouldn’t be a polished, ready to use asset in making a video.
To start with a nice polished asset, I normally start in Adobe Illustrator to draw most of my design assets, then put all of those assets together into a 1920×1080 Photoshop document where I organize the timeline into individual folders. After Photoshopping, I needed a way to share with clients what their project looks like. There didn’t seem like a whole lot of software out there to do this type of work when I first started…so enter Google Slides.
Google Slides
Google Slides is exactly like Microsoft PowerPoint and free to use. You just need a Google email address to login and use the service. You start with a blank template and import all of your 1920×1080 ’slides’ that I built using Illustrator and Photoshop. You can import each of your images into a slide and then in the ‘notes’ section below, you can add your script and design notes. You can then send your client a link and they can view the Google Slides Presentation to ‘pre-visualize’ your video. If all is well I bring in all of my assets into After Effects to finish the project.
Google Slides is my preferred method for storyboarding a video. It’s free, sharable with anyone with an internet connection and helps me perfect explain to a client exactly what their video will look like before we even start. If I need to update a design first, I do that and then update the storyboard. Pretty cool!
The finished Video and Storyboard
In this example, the finished product is the Portland Revaluation video below. To click over to see the storyboard in Google Slides, click here.