Seeing once again
Pixar's wonderful film
The Incredibles on the big screen, as I watched the
credits go up at the end I found myself having precisely the same thoughts as
when I first saw it back in 2004. Screen after screen of names, a vast army of
animators, each of whom can only have been working on a very small piece of the
film: perhaps a few shots, lasting a matter of seconds. And yet all the pieces
had worked together to make a story which is thrilling, funny and moving. Again
I found myself wondering: how on earth do they do it? When the effects they're
aiming to achieve depend so much on precise decisions about shot composition,
movement and above all timing, how do they make sure each animator's miniscule
contribution will work together with all the others?
By contrast, in my
work life, I was at that time coming to the end of a project involving the
assembly of a huge amount of web content, the creation of which had similarly
been atomised into a vast number of minute tasks. It wasn't looking good. As we
tried to put together the tiny fragments, some of which were just a single
sentence of text, we found that some of them repeated the contents of others,
some of them no longer fitted where they were meant to go because the author
had "improved" them in the writing, and some of them, we only now
realised, could never have fitted in
their designated slot. There had been a master plan, of course, in the form of
a vast spreadsheet, but it was so complex that few people understood it, and it
was so large that it was impossible to print out the entire thing and have the text
at a size which was actually readable. And now that we were starting to see the
plan realised, we were starting to see all kinds of flaws, in terms of what it
would mean for the experience of users - in this case, students. After some
frantic editing, we managed to fix the worst of the problems before it all went
live, so as to ensure that the content actually made sense when it was read together
and that student experience would be okay. But it was never going to be great.
The experience won't be like watching The Incredibles.
So again I find
myself thinking, how do Pixar do it? Are there lessons we can learn?
As is well known,
what they do is what every animation company does: they turn the script into storyboards - a sequence of graphic images to show, in rough, what the audience
is going to see. But what I think is NOT well known is just how much detail animators
go into with their storyboards. Here for example is the storyboard sequence for
the Army men scene from Toy Story - which also shows how Pixar demonstrate it
and test it out with their staff, a presenter pointing to each storyboard as
they talk through the script and explain the key story points.
But they don't stop
there. When they've a worked-out hand-drawn storyboard sequence, they animate
it using video-editing software and set it against a temporary sound track,
with the lines spoken by members of staff. This enables them to check even more
closely how the scene will work, and to refine the pace and timing - as well as
the shot composition and script - to tell the story with the proper emotional
impact. They can also judge how the scene works in the context of the entire
film, and some scenes never proceed beyond this stage. Here for example is one
scene which was deleted from Ratatouille: the heist scene, in which the rats
act as a team to steal food from the restaurant's rubbish bins, and Remy, who
is supposed to be keeping lookout, becomes distracted by the vision of the
splendid cuisine being prepared in the kitchen.
To sum it up, Pixar
use their storyboards to make an entire film in rough, before they ever switch
on their computers.
Contrast that with
the type of student-experience planning which is described as
"storyboarding" in online learning. The term was borrowed by the
producers of multimedia applications in the 1990s, for their detailed records
of the text, pictures, AV and interactions which would appear on screen
together (see the linked examples at the bottom of
this page from Michael Verhaart's teaching wiki ); but these
"storyboards" were primarily used as assembly instructions for those
building the applications, and insofar as they were used for testing, it was
for testing usability, as a kind of low fidelity prototype, not for testing
higher-order user experience.
Today, in
online learning,
as used by the University of Leicester for example, the term
"storyboarding" seems to mean little more than putting the components
of learning design into temporal sequence - an important piece of planning, to
be sure, but quite remote from learner experience; you couldn’t talk through
one of these storyboard sequences, like a Pixar presentation, and expect the
audience to experience anything like what is supposed to be experienced by the
learners.
Of course, the
experience of studying an online course is very different from the experience
of watching an animated film, which makes it intrinsically less suitable to
storyboarding. For one thing, watching a film is strictly linear, whereas in a
course a learner will switch their attention from place to place and even in a
linear sequence will move backwards and forwards. For another, a film lasts
matter of minutes or hours, rather than the tens or hundreds of hours entailed
in studying a course, so it would be impractical to reproduce the experience in
anything like real time. A third difference
is that a film is (usually) intended for the general public, so its developers
themselves are part of the intended audience, whereas following a course
(usually) requires previous knowledge and understanding (to say nothing of
interest in the subject!) so developers are typically not able to work through
a storyboard and experience anything like an intended student.
Nevertheless, I
think we should continue to strive to find ways to prototype not just the
product, not just the usability, but the learner experience - and to prototype
it in as close and as detailed a way as possible. Otherwise, our design efforts
will focus on what is easy to plan and test, the delivery of information,
without properly thinking about what learners will do with it, let alone how
they will learn from it. Can we produce courses which are as great and
compelling as the great Pixar films? Yes, I think we can, but to do so we need
to design and craft the learner experience
at just as fine a level of detail, and not simply generate content.
Postscript
Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar
quoted by Ian Sansom, provides some interesting details of the number of paper storyboards created for various Pixar films, for example:
The Incredibles 21,081;
Monsters Inc. 46,024;
Ratatouille, 72,000.
