How To Create Your Own Storyboards

I decided to write a little update to last week’s Storyboard post. I realized after posting about making storyboards as a great way to tell a story using a series of photos that I never actually told you how I make them. My bad!

A few people have asked me since that post to give them some pointers on how to make these fun storyboards for themselves. Well, here’s a quick tutorial of the way I’ve been doing them. I’m sure there are many different ways to get a similar outcome, but since I’m usually short on time, I haven’t had much time to explore and have just stuck to what I know — namely, FD’s Flickr mosaics and trusty ol’ Photoshop (but I’m sure any image editing software would do the trick).

This is how to do it:

1. Go through your photos stored on Flickr and mentally pick out photos that would work well in a series.

2. Next, pick out your mosaic style of choice from the Mosaic Maker. There are so many options to choose from. I’ve used the thin vertical frames, four frames with shadow, and most recently, 2+2 with shadow (see above). If you’ve read any of the archived posts of this blog, you will know what a fan I am of FD’s Flickr toys, the mosaic being my favorite. And I’m thrilled to find yet another use for it. It’s the perfect start to my storyboards.

3. When creating your mosaic, don’t be afraid to modify a layout based on your photo options. For example, when using the individual URLs option to upload photos, you do not have to fill every line. If you leave a blank line, that space will come out blank on your mosaic (like the picture here). See why this is perfect for storyboards? Use that space, if you’d like, to add a little description of the photos (again, see photo above for example).

4. Next, save the mosaic to the desktop and open it in Photoshop, where you can add text, shadows and even small stock photos or images for a creative touch (like this maple leaf). Search Google images or sites like Stock.XCHNG for free images to use.

5. Each time you add something else to the mosaic in Photoshop you will have to create a new layer. When you are finished adding your text, be sure to flatten your image so you can save it as a jpg. (On your tool bar at top, look under Layers and scroll down to near the bottom of the list to Flatten Image.)

6. Crop out any extra space and save your work.

7. You’re done and ready to upload your final storyboard to Flickr to share with friends and family!

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