A New Experience with Storyboards

As the year ends, I am re-posting my five most popular 2011 musings.  This one was ranked #1 in page views, so I am quite pleased to reshare it.  It was inspired by my favorite assignment from last school  year.


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I've gone head with my plan to assign pairs of my 10th grade American Government students the task of creating a one minute political commercial for a real person of note in our state who is not presently a political figure. Here's the assignment:

Campaign Ad Project

As you can see, I have not emphasized the production values of the video.  In fact, the video concept will "count" for as much as the the actual solution.  Here's the catch--  I have never taught the skill before.  Fortunately,  I found the following video:





One of the resources included with the video is a template for actually completing a storyboard.  At first glance I judged the template to be more detailed than needed for this assignment.  But as it turned out those details helped smany students develop very tight plans. Here's a link to the storyboard template:

Storyboard Template

I was pleased with most of the plans.  There were some obvious gaffes, such as no plan to mention that the person featured was seeking political office!  So I was able to head these off at the pass.  More significantly, I could offer feedback about visual story telling and plans for shots which might present too much difficulty (or violate trademarks).

Hopefully I will be able to publish some sample ads, soon!