Storyboard

In practice

A storyboard is a sequence of drawings, usually in panels like a comic strip, that shows how a film's shots will look before they are filmed. Each panel represents a shot or a key moment in one, with notes on camera movement, action and dialogue, so the director, cinematographer and crew can plan the scene together.

Storyboarding is a preproduction job. The script is written first; then the director works with a storyboard artist to turn its scenes into pictures, choosing angles, framing and the order of shots. Writers are rarely asked to draw them, but a script with clear, visual action lines is much easier to board.

Not every scene gets a storyboard. Productions usually board the scenes where planning saves the most time or money: stunts, visual effects, action sequences, complicated camera moves and anything shot with a second unit. Dialogue scenes in a single room are often left to a shot list and the director's judgment on the day.

A script beat that tells the storyboard artist what matters

Each paragraph is one picture: the entrance, the closing doors, the vault over the turnstile, the slide, the doors on his fingers. A storyboard artist can read the beat as panels without the writer naming a single shot, and the director stays free to choose the angles.

What a storyboard is

Merriam-Webster defines a storyboard as a panel or series of panels of rough sketches outlining the scene sequence and major changes of action or plot in a production to be shot on film or video. Each panel usually shows the frame as the camera will see it, with arrows for movement and short captions for action, sound or dialogue.

Storyboards range from rough thumbnails a director scribbles on a script page to polished drawings by a professional artist. Some productions build them digitally with storyboarding software, and many now turn them into animatics: the panels edited in sequence with timing, temporary sound and sometimes simple movement, so the scene can be watched before it is shot.

A storyboard is a planning tool, not a finished design. Shots change on set when a location, an actor or the light suggests something better, and few completed films match their boards exactly. Their value is that everyone arrives knowing what the scene is meant to look like and why.

A short history of storyboarding

The storyboard as a studio practice is usually credited to the Walt Disney Studios in the early 1930s, where story artists pinned sketches to boards to plan animated shorts. Webb Smith, a Disney story man, is often named as the person who first put a sequence of drawings up on a wall, and the method spread from animation to live-action filmmaking over the following decade.

Alfred Hitchcock was famous for planning his films in detail before shooting. Saul Bass, the graphic designer who created many of his title sequences, drew storyboards for the shower scene in Psycho (1960), one of the most studied short sequences in film history, which is built from dozens of brief shots.

Later directors made storyboards part of their signature. Ridley Scott, trained as an artist, draws his own boards, known as Ridleygrams. Steven Spielberg storyboarded Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark extensively, and large effects-driven productions now board, previsualize and animate their major sequences in detail long before principal photography.

Storyboard vs. shot list and script

The script describes what happens and what is said. The storyboard shows how it will look on screen. The shot list is a written table of every planned shot, with its number, size, angle, movement and lens, used to schedule the day and track coverage. Many productions use all three, and some scenes are planned with a shot list alone.

A storyboard and a shot list answer different questions. The board answers what the audience will see in each frame and in what order. The shot list answers what the crew needs to set up and how long it will take. Directors who think visually often board first and derive the shot list from the panels.

Storyboards are also different from concept art and previsualization. Concept art explores the look of a world or a character in single images; previs is a rough three-dimensional animation of a sequence, often used for complex effects work. A storyboard sits between them, quick enough to redraw and specific enough to shoot from.

Who makes storyboards

On most professional productions, a storyboard artist draws the boards under the director's guidance. The artist reads the script, meets with the director to talk through each scene, sketches the shots and revises them as the plan changes. The cinematographer, production designer and first assistant director often review them too.

Some directors draw their own, from crude stick figures to accomplished illustrations. Others work with a regular artist across many films. In animation, story artists are central to the writing process itself: the story is developed on boards, and the script and the boards are often revised together.

Screenwriters are rarely expected to storyboard a live-action script, and a spec script should not include drawings. A writer who also directs, or who is making a short film, may board key scenes to test whether the pages work visually, which can expose a confusing geography or a moment that needs a clearer image.

How to write scenes that board well

Give each image its own paragraph. A storyboard artist breaks a scene into pictures, and short action paragraphs that each describe one picture make that breakdown obvious. In the excerpt above, every paragraph is a panel, and the order of the paragraphs is the order of the shots.

Make the geography clear. Readers and artists need to know where people and objects are in relation to each other: the elevator across the lobby, the turnstile between Jin and the doors. A sentence of layout at the start of a scene saves confusion later, especially in action sequences.

Describe the moment, not the lens. The writer's job is to say what the audience should see and feel; the director's and artist's job is to decide how. Clear verbs, specific objects and a clear sense of scale let them make strong choices without fighting the page.