Storyboarding my way in!

[Pedro]

Hello there! I'm Pedro, part of Boords team!

It's great to join this exciting community at Prototypr!

Boords is a storyboarding creator app meant to help animators, motion designers, creative directors and pretty much anyone with an idea, to collaboratively build storyboards!

Am so looking forward to get to know the community and how can we keep shaping the product around the industry needs. DO get in touch if you give it a go and have any feedback!

[doug]

@Pedro Has potential, but still has usability issues.

1. Too many steps when adding an image to frame (Upload, Save, Done)
2. iPhone snapshot images too small to view in storyboard, even when you go to full-screen mode.
3. At first, it wasn't clear what "Action"s were. How to create them, and how should they be used. Then I realized that it's just text that accompanies an image for a frame.
4. It does not indicate how voiceovers are created or used. I guess they're just a voice alternative to text action.
5. The Discovery popup can't be hidden, even after completing everything up to PDF (which is only available with an upgrade)
6. Right now, it seems less useful than prototyping features available with Marvel, Sketch, InVision Studio, Figma, Overflow, etc.

Good idea, but needs work. Thanks for sharing, and hope the feedback is helpful.

[Pedro]

@doug loved the feedback! Thanks for writing in, Karen shared your message as well.

1. Curious about this one, typically you click the Replace button on the frame, select the image and click Upload. That should be it.
2. This one is a new one to us. Can you send me some screenshot or a way I can experience it and share with our dev team?
3. True point. We're adding some placeholder text there to give it more of an idea of what can go there. The confusion around the purpose is something I'll share with the team so that we can think of a way to make it clearer.
4. So the purpose for the Voiceover field is that you can pass on the idea of which voiceover should go together with that frame. Same thing with Action (what's happening on the frame).
5. Yes. We have this on our plate to update soon. Well spotted!
6. We love Marvel and Figma, but we've came up with Boords to be a storyboard specific app aiming at solving some industry pains.

There are of course a lot of ways to create storyboards - even with Google slides or Powerpoint.

The idea is that we can have the animator/designer worry only about the creative aspect of creating a storyboard, rather than having to worry how to first create a template to draw the storyboard frames for instance or having other users change the layout of his work.

We're also developing more towards the collaborative experience between users (easy drag & drop, real time collaboration) within a team or teams with clients, focusing on the feedback piece.

But I guess all of this comes more into play when you're collaborating on a storyboard, rather than working on your own.

Great you gave it a run Doug!

[Graeme]

@Pedro Hey this looks awesome, thanks for sharing your post on this too! Here it is for anyone searching: https://blog.prototypr.io/the-seven-steps-of-animation-production-d1c45427bdd4

I'll get this into our tools section this week! I've had the newsletter on hold since Christmas because of holidays, but I'll be starting that up again soon.

@doug how is the diabetes app going? It was a real mission to keep that programme going with everything else, but I'd like to carry on supporting projects.

I'm currently making a plan for the projects/areas to focus on myself. I'm going to write a quick update on that, and will link it back here!

p.s. Here is my update on changing this community to invite only.

[doug]

@Graeme Actually, the MyDiabetesMeals app is coming along quite nicely. I had been exploring various alternative flows, revisited some features, and explored many technical iOS topics. However, my prototype is finally starting to make progress significant progress. For example, I have enabled biometric authentication with either Touch ID or Face ID, which includes both local authentication as well as web site access. I have finally resolved how to parse HTML web pages and extract JSON-LD linked data to create recipe objects needed for the app. Also I'm integrating weekly meal plans as well.

[Pedro]

@Graeme thanks! Let me know once you push Boords into the Tools section. Cheers!