Storyboarding for Video Project

SYNOPSIS for Magical USB Commercial

Is your life dull and dry? Staring at your stale pasta and wishing something exciting was happening in your life? Well, now you can with the Magical USB Converter! (Now compatible with the Arduino Uno). It will electrify your life! Don’t use your USB to plug in your phone, computer, desktop. Use the magical USB converter to plug into objects, people, food or anything your heart desires! Once you plug it in, your world will explode with excitement! Hate birthday parties? What if you plugged your USB into your cake and it danced around to your favorite song? You can transform your world into anything you want it to be. 

Draft of Storyboard for Magical USB
Draft of Storyboard for Magical USB in preparation for our video project.

Thought Process

Our team, Abby, Tianjun, and I discussed how we could best prepare for meeting to plan our storyboard for our video project. Abby created a Google Docs document for us to contribute ideas to in preparation for our meeting. We all agreed to look for inspiration in the world around us that might provide either for a good subject matter or an interesting shooting location. We also thought we’d prefer to go down the road of picking a fake object to have as the subject matter of our video, and that we might have a better time all-around by leaning into a humorous vibe for the project.

When we met, Abby mentioned that she kept coming back to the idea of spending so much time commuting that she wished there were an easier/quicker way to get around. She mentioned something that would be like a transporter that would allow you to be one place, then, suddenly, another. I mentioned I had found online an article that mentioned a project called a USB Pet Rock along with other “pointless inventions” over the weekend. I commented that I really liked the idea of adding technology to a common object that really didn’t need it, for example a bowl… one that would rotate toward you to give you better access to the food on the other side of the bowl or that would tilt to allow you to get to the last bit of soup/cereal.

Coming back around to the topic of the transporter, Tianjun mentioned that she had seen an art project that involved an elevator that reversed the arrangement of the floor buttons and the buttons in the middle would take you to a random floor–like a surprise! She also wanted to bring about that element to incorporate my suggestion of adding technology to a commonplace item. From there, the Magical USB (MUSB) was born!

Colorized Version of Storyboard for Magical USB in preparation for our video project.
Colorized Version of Storyboard for Magical USB in preparation for our video project.

(For more details on the MUSB, see the Synopsis teaser above and stay tuned for our forthcoming video!)