Week 9: Storyboarding and Presentation
9.0 Storyboarding and Presentation
Objective(s): to develop a critical vocabulary and approach to analyzing visual culture; to develop a historical awareness the role visual culture has played in racialization and racial formation; to understand that representation is a multidisciplinary category that traffics between mathematics, aesthetics, politics, among many others.
Orientation
Storyboarding is a film technique in which cinematographers layout, shot-by-shot, their story; it situates images into a narrative logic. For the purposes of antiracism, storyboarding assumes students know how to analyze images formally (e.g., focal point; filters; lighting; etc.), socially (i.e., to understand the types of cultural formation they affirm), and historically (i.e., in relation to earlier visual tropes). The act of storyboarding, then, represents subjects and is representative of the storytellers; both constituents are activated in storyboarding: situationality of the subjects and the positionality of the storyteller. Representation is a multidisciplinary concept. For the purposes of the CDF curriculum, we approach it aesthetically and politically. The three activities outlined below invite students to think through representation and narrative logic.
Activities
Premise
Starting with familiar, easily accessible texts, like children’s picture books, helps them gain experience practices a new form of analysis (visual rhetorics) in a playful, low stakes way that directly informs their own storytelling practices.
Purpose
This exercise provides students with a playful, fun approach to visual rhetorics by analyzing picture books.
Preparation
Select a series of children’s picture books (e.g., Cece Loves Science ; Not Quite Snow White ; Babar and His Children ; Anti-Racist Baby ; Five Chinese Brothers ; Steam Train, Dream Train ). Upload to Canvas, Drive, or whichever educational platform employed by your course. Invite students to select one story to read and analyze among their project groups, or assign them one to read. (Note: if you assign different stories to different groups, a secondary presentation in which groups can present their “findings” to another group. This helps develop confidence, experience presenting stories, and, horizontally, circulates different analytical approaches across the class.)
Protocol
- In project groups, invite students to read a children’s story to uncover its ideological background based on comparative analysis of its images, characters and characterization, plot, tone, and mood.
- A second approach invites students to reverse-engineer the story based upon its images. Here, students block out the text and excavate the plot, characters and characterization, and ideology by attending only to the images.
Premise
Starting with the familiar, students gain experience by analyzing visual rhetorics directly related to their experiences, communities of care, and cultural backgrounds.
Purpose
This exercise provides students with a playful approach to analyzing how images represent people, or use people to represent values.
Preparation
Ask students to identify 2-3 Instagram feeds that influence their daily lives in small or big ways. Influencers may be defined as professional or sponsored feeds, or feeds that nourish students in a meaningful way. Students describe a) what the feed is about and who it attempts to influence; and b) how it uses visual culture to influence its followers.
Protocol
In project groups, students select one Instagram feed to share with the class. Here, students review their analyses, which were pre-written for homework in 2-3 minutes. Once each member has shared, the group selects one feed to read slowly as a group. The group then forms a hypothesis about what the feed purports to do by slowly examining ten different images across a specified time period. There is an option for project groups to share their analysis with the class via short presentation or posting to a discussion thread. If selecting the latter, then invite each project group to respond to 2 other’s posts.
Premise
Teachers prioritize text-based instruction over teaching visual syntax; this exercise attunes teachers to role images have in storytelling.
Purpose
The purpose of this exercise is for students to select, analyze, and position images in relationship to the stories their projects will tell; it is the first step in outlining their stories.
Preparation
Project groups should have a clear sense of their project, its scope and inquiry, historical and current research (and research methods), how disciplinary genres have employed narrative structures to tell stories, identified subjects, and discovered plot points (from data) to feature in their story.
Protocol
The analytical emphasis here centers on students’ use of images to represent, position, and characterize subjects featured in their stories. There are four steps that move students from reflection to selection to analysis and then organization of images.
Reflections on Representations, Part 1
As a project group, reflect on what you’ve learned thus far about representation, positionality, and how visual culture (e.g., images) interacts with both by addressing the following questions:
-
- What do images do within the context of a storytelling process?
- Which images will you use to represent subjects?
- How will you find images?
- How will you know you’ve received consent?
Image Selection, Part 2
Identify all the images you may feature as part of your story, presentation, or final project. Gather them in a single folder that allows all project groups members to access them simultaneously (e.g., Google Drive). Title each image, unless already titled. Have one group member created a running citation list for all images, which will make in-text citations and project bibliographies or works cited that much easier.
Rhetorical Analysis of Images, Part 3
- What are the salient visual components at work in the image?
- What formal choices did the photographer make when composing the shot? -or the editor when developing the image?
- What effect do these choices have on the reader?
- What stories do the images tell?
Staging, Part 4
Once you’ve gathered all your images, identified their formal choices and subjects, and examined how they explicate, position, and represent subjects, objects, and ideas, then begin to think about the story you wish to tell and which images in which order will best help with the storytelling.
-
- How do these interact with your research, data, and plot points? -with the lived experiences of your story’s human subjects?
- How will you balance your voice versus the voice of your characters?
- Organize your images in the order that best tells your story.
