The Importance of the Storyboard

Each time I go to the grocery store, I make a checklist for what I need. I do this for a couple reasons. It helps me ensure that I buy everything I need, it helps me make sure I do not buy things i do not need, and even helps me plan my diet better so that I get a variety  of nutritious foods.

Much like a grocery store checklist, storyboards provide you with a checklist of the visuals you need to capture before executing your story. Story boards are ways that you can visually plan your story to affectively tell your story. It is a visual outline.

They provide you with a basic skeleton and make sure your story is concise and easy to understand.

Storyboards help you brainstorm and think visually about potential shots you can capture to tell your multimedia story in the best was possible.

Animator, director, and producer Craig McCraken once said “The storyboard artists is to plan out shot for shot the whole show, write all the dialog and decide the mood, actions, jokes, pacing etc, of every scene.”

Storyboards are the foundation and blueprint for appealing, concise and quality multimedia projects.

Freedom of the Press Map

This map is an indication of how free journalists in other nations are in their coverage. Living in the United States where freedom of the press is a constitutional and “unalienable” right, it is surprising that many nations are restricted in their freedom.

I believe the freedom of the press to criticize US government is something that is taken for granted every day,

However, in 1964 when America was once the leading nation in press freedom, it now ranks 46th in comparison with rest of the world.

This is an excerpt for USA Today:

“Both the Bush and Obama administrations challenged the distinction between journalists and other people who receive classified information. The Obama administration placed Associated Press reporters under surveillance and, in 2010, named Fox News correspondent James Rosen “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” for his work with a whistle-blower.

If that seems perfectly Nixonian, it is actually perfectly Obamian. While President Nixon was denounced for his use of the Espionage Act of 1917, Obama has brought twice the number of such prosecutions of all prior presidents under the act. Julian Assange, the publisher of the WikiLeaks material, is now hiding in an embassy in London, and the administration is seeking an absurd 105-year sentence against freelance journalistBarrett Brown for linking to hacked e-mails and other leaked information.”

In America, freedom of the press is needed more than ever.

12 Years a Slave

Last week, I watched now Oscar ward winning film “12 Years a Slave.”

I was empowered and horrified while watching the film.

The movie was about an upstate New York black man who was born free. He was educated, had a career, wife, and kids and was manipulated, then bought and sold into slavery despite the fact that he was a free man. The movie showed the struggle and hardship he faced with being away from his family, retaining his sense of dignity, and ultimately being owned by a another person.

The movie is based off of the true life story of Solomon Northup and depicts an element of not commonly taught about. Northup also wrote a book called “12 Years a Slave” after his experience. Here is an excerpt.

“It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there. The building to which the yard was attached, was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington. Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it, would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol! Such is a correct description as it was in 1841, of Wiliams’ slave pen in Washington, in one of the cellars of which I found myself so unaccountably confined.”