By Eduardo Miranda on October 3, 2022
What is a Storyboard?
A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of illustrations or images of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. It’s made up of a number of squares with illustrations or pictures representing each shot, with notes about what’s going on in the scene and what’s being said in the script during that shot.
Like a script, your storyboard visually guides you throughout the production process. By planning your video, you know which shots you need to create and how to create them when filming begins. You can get others’ feedback early on and make simple adjustments to your storyboard, rather than making major changes while filming.
Why Do You Need a Storyboard?
Best way to share your vision
A visual aid makes it much easier for you to share and explain your vision for your video with others.
We’ve all had experiences where we were trying to explain something and the other person just can’t see our vision. The core of this issue is that most stakeholders don’t have the experience of visualizing something off of a text deliverable, such as a script.
With a storyboard, you can show people exactly how your video is going to be mapped out and what it will look like. This makes it infinitely easier for other people to understand your idea.
Makes production much easier
When you storyboard a video you’re setting up a plan for production, including all the shots you’ll need, the order that they’ll be laid out, and how the visuals will interact with the script.
The video storyboard is a starting point or suggested throughline around which you can plan your coverage (all the angles you will shoot of a scene). This really comes in handy when you’re making your video, as it ensures you won’t forget any scenes and helps you piece together the video according to your vision.
Saves you time
While it may take you a little while to put your storyboard together, in the long run, it will save you time in revisions later. Not only will it help you explain your vision to your team, but it will also make the creation process go more smoothly.
Film
A film storyboard (sometimes referred to as a shooting board), is essentially a series of frames, with drawings of the sequence of events in a film, similar to a comic book of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand. It helps film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Besides this, storyboards also help estimate the cost of the overall production and save time. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement. For fast-paced action scenes, monochrome line art might suffice. For slower-paced dramatic films with an emphasis on lighting, color impressionist style art might be necessary.
In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens. In the case of interactive media, it is the layout and sequence in which the user or viewer sees the content or information. In the storyboarding process, most technical details involved in crafting a film or interactive media project can be efficiently described either in a picture or in additional text.
Animatics
In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how a scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) displayed in sync with rough dialogue (i.e., scratch vocals) or rough soundtrack, essentially providing a simplified overview of how various visual and auditory elements will work in conjunction to one another.
This allows the animators and directors to work out any screenplay, camera positioning, shot list, and timing issues that may exist with the current storyboard. The storyboard and soundtrack are amended if necessary, and a new animatic may be created and reviewed by the production staff until the storyboard is finalized. Editing at the animatic stage can help a production avoid wasting time and resources on the animation of scenes that would otherwise be edited out of the film at a later stage. A few minutes of screen time in traditional animation usually equates to months of work for a team of traditional animators, who must painstakingly draw and paint countless frames, meaning that all that labor (and salaries already paid) will have to be written off if the final scene simply does not work in the film's final cut. In the context of computer animation, storyboarding helps minimize the construction of unnecessary scene components and models, just as it helps live-action filmmakers evaluate what portions of sets need not be constructed because they will never come into the frame.
Animatics are also used by advertising agencies to create inexpensive test commercials. A variation, the "rip-o-matic", is made from scenes of existing movies, television programs or commercials, to simulate the look and feel of the proposed commercial. Rip, in this sense, refers to ripping-off an original work to create a new one.
Architectural studios
Occasionally, architectural studios need a storyboard artist to visualize presentations of their projects. Usually, a project needs to be seen by a panel of judges and nowadays it’s possible to create virtual models of proposed new buildings, using advanced computer software to simulate lights, settings, and materials. Clearly, this type of work takes time – and so the first stage is a draft in the form of a storyboard, to define the various sequences that will subsequently be computer-animated.
Novels
Storyboards are now becoming more popular with novelists. Because most novelists write their stories by scenes rather than chapters, storyboards are useful for plotting the story in a sequence of events and rearranging the scenes accordingly.
Comic books
Some writers have used storyboard type drawings for their scripting of comic books, often indicating staging of figures, backgrounds, and balloon placement with instructions to the artist as needed often scribbled in the margins and the dialogue or captions indicated.
See other samples on the storyboard page here.
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