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Tutorial: How to tell a whiteboard story

A whiteboard video story is a  very efficient way to present a short story, an explanation of a concept, or a short tutorial. Typical whiteboard story consists of video of somebody drawing on the whiteboard accompanied by a narration, explaining the video. A good whiteboard story is 2 – 3 minutes in length and approximately 250 words.

Within this format you can reasonably explain a simple concept or present a single idea, not much more. You can start by brainstorming whiteboard pictures or you can start with narration text, but either way you will need both before you can start recording. All story telling rules apply to whiteboard story – start by capturing attention and lead the audience to the conclusion.

When you are ready to record your whiteboard video, start drawing and record while you draw. In most cases you will want video focusing on just a portion of your drawing, not the entire whiteboard. It helps if you have somebody else in charge of the video camera, but it is possible to do both – drawing and controlling the camera yourself with a little practice. Most likely you will need several takes to get a suitable video footage.

When you have the video footage you need to do rough video edit and double check the footage against the narrative text – if you missed anything or material is in different order you will need to re-record the video or change narration. Usually the video will be several times longer than the narration (drawing on the whiteboard takes time), but you can always speed the video up.

At this point you should check for redundancy between your video contents and narration. Ideally your narration and video story would support and complement each other, but not repeat. Some overlap might be unavoidable, but try to reduce it.

The next step is to record the narration audio. There are number of free and paid applications you can use for this purpose. Audacity is particularly well suited for this purpose – it supports most audio formats, can record audio and allows simple audio edits. Setting up and recording the audio is outside of the scope of this tutorial – a simple web search should uncover plenty of resources.

Once you have recorder the narration, cut audio into logical clips. Usually those clips are cut at the sentence boundaries. This is also a good opportunity to clean-up the audio, get rid of the chair squeaks, shuffling, breathing, and other unwanted or distracting noises.

A screenshot of recorded narration is below. In this screenshot you can see narration waveform with distinct pauses (silence) between sentences. Cut the narration into clips at those places and try to get rid of most of the silence.

The easiest way to cut the audio into clips is to select each sentence on the track (see below) and then export (File->Export Selection…):

When exporting save audio files as 16bit PCM .wav files. To make final video editing easier, name clips such that it is easy to determine sequence and contents of each clip just by file name. It will save time later.

In my example I ended with 20 audio clips.

Next open your video editor – I am using Windows Live Movie Maker – and import your video footage. I like to start at the beginning of the project and edit all sections in order. That way I have to do less to tidy the project when I am done.

First, let’s add an intro with title. Because the type of project calls for mostly cut transitions, I am not applying a theme here, but rather am picking transitions individually – the intro fades in and then crossfades into main video footage. I have also added a background music for intro:

Since I am not using audio from recorded video, but separately recorded narration, I need to adjust audio mix:

Next, as I place my narration clips one by one, I determine matching points in the whiteboard video and split it. The split point is going to be much later than the end of the text. To remedy that select the newly split video clip and adjust its speed until its end is close to where your narration ends:

Continue working your way through the project adding more narration clips and splitting video. To help position narration more precisely, move editing cursor (caret) to the desired position then drag and drop the narration clip close to the caret – beginning of the narration clip will automatically snap to the caret.

When all the narration clips are placed and video trimmed accordingly, it is time to add credits with a matching music clip. That way the story does not end abruptly.

Here is how the finished project looks in Windows Live Movie Maker:

And here is the resulting video:

 

And that is all. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and try it for yourself!