tips

How storyboards shape your storytelling

Garr Reynolds, better known as PresentationZen is, alongside Nancy Duarte, one of the authorities on presenting and presentations. He posted recently on using storyboards to help craft your story and refine your message. He includes some excellent clips from Pixar’s Bug’s Life and Toy Story storyboard process.

A good storyboard artist is a good storyteller. The drawings do not have to be pretty, but they must have the meaning and the feelings behind the idea –  Garr Reynolds

One of the examples of the storyboarding process Garr includes shows the late Joe Ranft in the storyboard and pitching process for A Bugs Life.

See his full post here Presentation Zen: Storyboarding & the art of finding your story.

Pixar President Ed Catmull on open communication

Communication needs to be between anybody at any time. Outside the structure, and outside the order.

Ed Catmull, President Pixar

In a short video interview, Ed Catmull talks about the challenges to open communication on Toy Story.

via Fastcompany

Ed Catmull, President Pixar

Is Adobe Voice really a storytelling app?

When the interwebs went a little crazy for the announcement of Adobe Voice, the new iPad-based ‘storytelling’ app, my first reaction was skepticism. After all, ‘story’ and ‘storytelling’ are terms that get bandied around a LOT. Rather than be critical initially, I deleted a snarky tweet, went to the app store and gave it a try.

Wow. Let me repeat that. Wow. I created my first Voice in about 15 minutes. I’m not saying it’s going to win a Golden Lion, but as an example of what this can do a tool for pulling together an idea rapidly, you’ll get the idea.

As an occasional gadget geek, I have like shiny objects. But immediately I can see this has some real potential for helping people structure messages, think through what they want to say and get ideas across in a simple way. There are a variety of basic story structures to select from; promote an idea, explain a concept, share a personal experience, and even the classic hero’s journey. There are a selection of visual themes, the ability to draw from a broad range of icons, or the options to draw in files from the cloud, from Facebook or take a fresh pic on the spot. It is a very intuitive interface.

I’m excited by the potential something like this has for capturing ideas and helping people share their stories within organisations. In fact, I predict a Prezi like rush on people putting this to use. I’ll keep experimenting and save a longer post when I get some feedback from other #comms and #internalcomms folk.

In the meantime, give it a try and let me know how you would use this in your communication toolkit.

Note: I have no affiliation with Adobe and this is review is an independent perspective. 

AWC announces Best Australian Blogs 2014 Winners

The Australian Writers’ Centre have announced the winners of the Best Australian Blogs for 2014 and features, and there are a couple of great ones for communication folk to check out.

The winning business blog, Socially Sorted has some great tips on social media marketing, with a healthy balance of resources, tips, tools. In terms of content marketing, it fulfils its own brief very well and has lots of shareable advice I will be striving to apply.

The best writing blog is TwentySix by writer and sometime social media blogger Andrew Hutchinson. He has some great perspectives on storytelling, and is very frank about the process of writing.

The overall winner, The Hungry Australian is a mouth watering food blog from South Australian, Christina Soong.

The full list is here at the Australian Writers’ Centre Best Australian Blogs: Winners 2014 – Australian Writers’ Centre. Congratulations!