Demo: Storyboarding an Epic

In this demo, I’m going to sketch out one of the HVAC in a hurry storyboards. The story about Trent needing to identify a part so he can figure out his next steps. And I encourage you to try doing these storyboards just as very rough sketches. Most storyboards have natural rhythms of three. I’m going to give it a try with six panels here. So Trent is working on a piece of HVAC equipment and he has found a part that he’s not sure what it is. So now things fan out and we have a few possibilities. One is that he knows what the part number is. So, maybe he’s holding the part here and the part number is sitting on the part.

And he just wants to find it in his handheld and order it.

The other possibility is that, he’s not sure what the part is. And maybe he’s looking at the part and then he’s looking at his mobile.

And he’s trying to look at some documentation to figure out, okay, what is this part? And then another possibility, the third possibility about identifying part is that it’s just not sure what it is so maybe he goes and takes a photo of the part and the unit and he sends that over to his team so they can help him identify it. Now, once he finds the part on the system, he’s going to want to know when is it available and how much is are going to cost, so that he can go and talk to the customer.

That’s his next step and final step hopefully he’s talking to the customer.

She just wants to know when her stuff’s going to be repaired and he’s going to tell her cost and date so they can reach a final decision together. So this may look simple and it may look kind of but remember the topper problem. We always think that we communicate a lot more than we actually do to our audiences. And these storyboards are a great way to help overcome that and also to identify little gaps that details which may really matter that you otherwise would have miss, especially as you move from epic story to child stories.