Storytelling is a core component in designing for meaningful, engaging experiences but its usefulness goes beyond helping communicate the goals and benefits of your product or design to stakeholders, team members and users. With a strong understanding of storytelling we can make better decisions about functionality, appearance, UI, tone and more, to evoke the experiences we want to create for our users.
Filmmaking, a storytelling medium, follows a similar process, beginning with a screenplay and then deriving from it a series of decisions like appearance, action, composition, etc. all of which are made to influence the audience’s experience. To do this, filmmakers have developed and long made use of tools and techniques that aid in communicating with audiences to better evoke ideas, emotions, and even behaviors.
Some of these tools, like storyboards and parallax animation, have already found their way into our processes and designs. But a closer examination of these tools reveals possibilities to expand upon them and strengthen their impact.
And a deeper exploration of filmmaking itself reveals numerous additional techniques that are not often discussed in interactive design, but hold potential for adaptation and can serve to challenge and inspire designers. For example:
- Tools that help their crews collaborate and coordinate around a film’s vision.
- Cinematic patterns used to convey information and characteristics about a objects and characters
- Methods for directing viewer’s attention and guiding their experience
Prior to becoming a designer, I studied filmmaking and animation. While my career has taken me in a slightly different direction, I’ve found that many of the cinematic storytelling ideas and principles I learned in those years have shaped and improved my approach to designing for experiences in digital environments. As technology continues to advance and allow interfaces and data to react in near-real time, the opportunities to explore new techniques in visual communication only expand.
Attendees of this presentation will come away with new insights into visual storytelling and its applications to their work. With exposure to new tools, potential techniques such as camera and storytelling devices, and ideas as to how to leverage them, they will be able to explore their potential use in their work.
Additionally, attendees of this talk will leave inspired to look closer at the process and mechanics of filmmaking in an effort to learn and further their own craft in creating digital products and services. What can we learn from great films and filmmakers? And how can we apply these understandings to our work in creating experiences for people?
