Arts-In-Education Exploratory Enrichment

Visualizing Creative Writing: Storyboarding for Story Structure

Presented by Rodro

In this multifaceted program, award-winning author/illustrator Paul Rodriguez selects from his books and illustrations to demonstrate how storyboarding is used to develop stories for picture books, movies, TV shows, and even video games. Students see video examples of the process from Pixar and others and then collaborate in a storyboarding demonstration. They participate in activities contributing original ideas to learn what writing and illustrating have in common. Following the same structure of basic story elements, each art form (drawing and writing) helps them deepen their understanding of the other. They discover how the thousand words a picture is worth can help them find the keywords they need to write a successful and captivating story. The presentation is based on a simple beginning-middle-end story structure but can be modified to accommodate teachers’ writing goals for their classes.