Storyboarding is the process of illustrating moments of a video production to visualize sequences and guide the production process. 

The illustrations, coupled with occasional labels and written notes, come together to create a storyboard. These helpful guides serve as a rough sketch of what a sequence might look like once shot and edited.

Filmmakers use storyboards the way musicians use sheet music. Both know that their visual guide has gone through multiple edits, and can lead them to a desired creative outcome. They share copies with their team so that everyone’s on the same page. And while there is always room to improvise, they know the guide is always there to return to if needed.

The person leading a project’s creative execution oversees the storyboarding process. On a film, this is the director.

Film directors might storyboard independently, especially if it’s a smaller production. However, many directors collaborate with other members of their crew including:

• The director of photography, who uses their expertise in camera movements, shot compositions, and lighting to advise on shots
• Professional storyboard artists skilled at drawing by hand or using digital software
• Production designers, who can offer guidance on the visual world of the story
• Editors, who might advise on more complex sequences and the overall pacing of shots
• Stunt coordinatators and choreographers, who could be consulted while storyboarding more complex movement sequences

Storyboard Artist W.D. Hogan (Stranger Things, Red Notice, Watchmen) gave us some exclusive insights on the storyboarding process of the biggest television shows.

“If you’re directing a scene with a lot of VFX or a lot of stunts, several departments are involved,” he explains. “To make sure everyone has the same idea of what the car chase looks like or what creature the Mandalorian is battling, we draw out the shots so it’s crystal clear to all involved.”

Outside of film shoots, other professionals join the storyboarding process. For instance, on television shows, a showrunner usually offers their input. On advertisement and marketing shoots, an agency’s creative director as well as the client typically sign off on the storyboards before filming.

Director Denis Villeneuve explains how he and his crew used storyboarding to plan and execute some of the most complex sequences in Dune: Part Two.

There are lots of variation to storyboards. Some can be minimal without any words, while others can be extremely complex.

However, most storyboards include the following…

Every storyboard is made up of rectangular panels, where each panel represents an on-screen moment from the point of view of the camera. A storyboard template is usually a page of empty panels.

Do each of these “moments” represent a separate shot? Usually, but not all the time. For long tracking shots, some filmmakers might decide to use multiple panels. For fast-paced fighting sequences with handheld camera movements, filmmakers might choose to focus on key moments.

However, the most fundamental rule of storyboarding is that every shot should be visually represented.

While some film storyboards rely on illustrations alone, many include labels for reference, usually indicating the shot number as it appears on the shot list. Further details can be added to the labels, including the shot type, scene name, or a super short description.

Each panel features an illustration of that moment in the story. While the level of detail can vary depending on the director, storyboard artist, and budgetary or time constraints, the drawings must showcase the intended shot composition and important elements of the scene.

Primarily, this includes:

• Subjects — Who’s being featured?
• Background — Where are we? How can we tell?
• Key props — What important objects are being shown?
• Camera placement — How close or far are the characters and objects to the camera?
• Camera angle — What direction is the camera shooting in?
• Framing — Where are the characters and objects located within the frame?
• Action —What are the characters doing, and how are they doing it?
• Camera movement — If the camera is moving, how is it moving? This is usually visualized through arrows.

Some storyboard artists might add extra details, including lighting effects and important colors.

When drawing each moment, it’s important to emphasize clarity over quality.

For Storyboard Artist Jeff Errico (Birds of Prey, Violent Night, Greyhound), simpler is sometimes better.

“Understanding the 180 rule, consistency of right to left, left to right: those are the things that people care about,” he explains. “Those are the things that are going to make you a good storyboard artist because on the day they matter.”

Though a picture can say a thousand words, sometimes a few extra words are necessary. Storyboard artists often include a space, description box, or lines beneath each panel to describe the moment clearly or add any necessary notes.

Some might leave theirs blank. Others might fill each one up with notes for clarity. Ultimately, it’s up to the filmmakers to create a storyboard that works for them.

Storyboards all begin with words. Whether it’s a script or treatment, the jumping off point always begins with the question of where to begin? It’s not ideal to storyboard every single aspect of a movie – you’re better off focusing on the key (read: more costly) sequences in your script. Before diving into the process of sketching out scenes, consider which are the most crucial to telling your story, in both emotion (story) and financial (production) terms.

Storyboarding can be done by hand or digitally. Depending on your budget, technical skills, and comfort level, you can storyboard using a variety of tools, including:

Paper — Some people simply feel more creative and flexible when they’re working with their hands. A paper and pencil can allow you to sketch out moments with easily accessible materials. However, for complex sequences that require hundreds of panels, doing everything by hand can get a little tedious.

Free Digital Software — There are many free online storyboarding tools, with Storyboarder by WonderUnit topping many lists.¹ This technology allows users to quickly create panels, sketch out scenes, add descriptions, and share and export their final storyboards. Users can also copy and paste elements, making it a lot quicker than drawing everything out by hand.

Paid Digital Software — For detailed storyboards or complex workflows, professional paid programs might be the way to go. Adobe Photoshop is one of the more popular choices for storyboard artists. At less than $80/month, Toon Boom Storyboard Pro allows users to create impressive illustrations with detailed characters, lighting, colors. At $44/month, Boords’ standard plan gives up to three people the ability to edit a storyboard at the same time.

AI Storyboarding Tools — While artificial intelligence shouldn’t replace a director’s vision, it could be used to help visualize their ideas cheaply and effectively – whether it’s generating video panels that showcase camera movement, or enhancing drawings to reflect the tone of the film. Stay tuned for the end of this article where we’ll take a closer look at this new technology.

Before sketching can take place, you need a storyboard template to work from. If you’re not using a storyboarding software with pre-installed panels, you’ll have to print out some templates online, or draw them by hand.

Once you’ve landed on which scenes you’ll be storyboarding, it’s time to really start thinking about them visually. Thumbnail sketches are fast, rough drawings that represent the basic idea of your chosen shot or scene. Intentionally created with little detail, thumbnails are meant to serve as a starting point in visualizing the layout of the story, enabling directors to focus more on ideas and compositions.

You don’t need to be a great artist to draw great storyboards. Check out this video to learn what sort of illustrations are most helpful for film crews.

After thumbnail sketches are agreed upon, it’s time to refine the images by adding details, making sketches clearer, and implementing camera angles. As with thumbnail sketches, the goal is to align the artwork with the intention of the written narrative.

After objects and characters are made more detailed and clearer, storyboard artists will start to look at the spacing of the characters to objects and one another in the frame. Artwork can often speak louder than words and it’s the storyboard artist’s job to tell an easy-to-follow story with their drawings.

When the images are clear, completed, and detailed, artists will usually work with filmmakers to include whatever relevant notes to drive the intent of the image. These notes can be dialogue, camera movements, sound effects, or any other pertinent information for the production team.

Like everything else in the filmmaking process, it’s often necessary to get feedback on work. Getting different opinions on artistic output is essential to nearly every step of the creative process before finalizing the art.

Even if you’re storyboarding by hand, software tools can be enormously helpful in enhancing, layering and editing images. Many of these tools also offer the option of creating a motion between individual shots, and building an animatic, which can be extremely useful when planning a sequence.

The process completes when all the artistic elements have been implemented, along with whatever creative input the filmmakers decide to use. Storyboards can then be distributed to crew accordingly.

Storyboards are meant, first and foremost, to be a communicative tool. So, simplicity is the name of the game here. The more quickly and cleanly your images are expressed, the more successful they’ll be. Focus on the visual essence of each scene, and avoid distracting clutter.

It’s important to maintain a singular artistic style throughout your storyboards. A change from one type to another could jar the visual flow of the narrative. It can also further display an unprofessional quality to the work that you always want to avoid.

Composition dictates where objects and characters fall within a frame. Think through which elements have the most relevance to the shot (and overall scene) and place them accordingly. With composition, you also want to consider focal points and camera angles to make the image engaging. And to that point…

Lighting, camera movement, and shot transitions all contribute to the overall aesthetic of any shot, whether that be an illustrated drawing or a fully-rendered film image. Be aware of all the tools at your disposal, and avoid complex or confusing shots that would be impossible to pull off with your technology and/or budget. For some inspiration, take a look at these.

There are ways to make even still images kinetic. Energy can be conveyed in a number of ways in a single illustrated frame. Experiment with motion lines, unique camera angles and dynamic posing and position of the elements in the frame.

Make sure there’s an organic logic to the flow of your images. Do they mesh well together? Does one naturally lead into the next? Is anything missing? Are any redundant? Is the sequence cohesive? And on that note…

Storyboarding is about more than just still images. It’s also about how each flows into the next and creates a pace and tone for the sequence. Ignoring the rhythm of shots could disrupt the flow of the visual narrative.

Try a mix of close-ups and establishing master shots to express a sequence. Oftentimes, an audience’s emotions and context are manipulated by how close (or far) they are from a visual subject. You’ll keep your viewer engaged at a deeper level if the way the images are presented is constantly changing. If they aren’t changing, there should be a clear storytelling intent behind that choice.

As stated earlier, feedback is an extraordinarily valuable part of the storyboarding process. Gaining an outsider’s perspective can often provide ideas you never would have come up with on your own.

Revising typically leads to stronger, clearer work. Make sure there’s a solid balance between artistic expression and contextual communication – it’s a fine line to walk, but you don’t want to come across as too stylized, nor do you want the work to be seen as monotonous and without flavor.

Storyboarding dates back to the earliest days of cinema. The concept can be traced to the late 19th century when filmmaker Georges Méliès² used illustrations to prepare for shooting sequences. Formal storyboarding actually began with Walt Disney and his team of animators in the 1920s and 1930s. It was used to simplify and facilitate the production process of potentially complex and costly animation scenes.

Artists would begin by breaking scripts down into smaller sequences, then sketching scenes in chronological beats, with one image organically leading into the next. The animation team was then able to discern the appropriate camera angles, frame composition, and character movements needed for each sequence.

In the 1970s through the 1990s, digital softwares with drawing capabilities like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator started to redefine how storyboards can be illustrated.³ While some filmmakers continue to storyboard by hand, there are now many digital softwares specific to storyboarding that offer a variety of unique features.

Over the years, the process of storyboarding has also expanded beyond animation and film. It is now an essential tool in fields such as advertising, video game design, virtual reality experiences, and marketing campaigns. The versatility of storyboarding lies in its ability to convey complex ideas and narratives visually, making it a universal language of creativity.

The use of AI in filmmaking is a hotly debated topic – and rightly so. There are many ethical and creative concerns surrounding the use of generative AI.

However, storyboarding products like Storyboarder.ai and Storyboard Hero AI are already incorporating generative AI technology into their platforms. Let’s take a look at how this new technology is changing the way some productions approach storyboarding.

AI storyboarding platforms can generate an entire storyboard from a script alone. Users don’t even have to provide a shot list, as the software interprets the text and generates their interpretation of the ideal sequence of shots based on machine learning. Within seconds, they can generate a lengthy storyboard with illustrations, labels, and descriptions.

Filmmakers can edit an AI generated storyboard, changing shots entirely or directing the software to regenerate parts of an illustration. If a filmmaker has their own original storyboard, they can still upload it to the platform and use the fine-tune editing features to change or improve their illustrations.

Storyboard artists now have the option to change the look and style of all their illustrations with a click of a button, including adding color, lighting, and realism. For less talented artists, this could help them capture the tone of the film or project without spending hours learning a new drawing style.

Some platforms like Storyboarder.ai take storyboarding a step further by translating storyboards into video animatics with actual movement. Rather than relying on arrows to indicate camera movements or text to describe what the characters are doing, the storyboard can actually show all these elements in real time.

Filmmakers can further use AI voice tools like Elevenlabs.io to add believable dialogue, sound effects, and even music to a storyboard animatic.

These technologies allow filmmakers to create, edit, and improve a shot-for-shot version of their film during pre-production, providing a detailed reference for the shoot. While this serves the same essential purpose of storyboarding, it’s generally faster, cheaper, and leaves less to the imagination – for better or for worse.

New technologies can be exciting, but filmmakers should carefully weigh the following ethical, creative, and business implications of generative AI.

1. Intellectual Property Concerns
   Generative AI programs are trained on large datasets that include copyrighted work. Generated storyboard illustrations will likely include data from other pieces of art, photographs, or films without crediting or compensating the original artist. This creates a lot of ethical concern especially within teams of fellow artists and creatives.
2. Erosion of Vision
   Unless a director wrote the script, the storyboarding process is one of the first steps where they can start expressing their voice and vision for the production. Relying too much on artificial intelligence to visualize the story sort of defeats the purpose of a director and/or cinematographer.
3. Less Creative Control
   Even if a director tries to stay true to their vision, it’s difficult to fully control the look of generated art when compared to storyboarding by hand. Ultimately, a stick figure drawing that communicates exactly what a director wants is much better than a high quality AI illustration that misinterprets the director’s vision. Trying out different keywords and making fine-tune edits to ensure the final illustration matches a director’s vision can be extremely time consuming.
4. Leaving Storyboard Artists Behind
   Convenience often comes at a cost. Goldman Sachs estimates that nearly 300 million jobs in the United States and Europe could be lost to AI.⁴ Storyboard artists who traditionally provided an authentic human touch to storyboarding might lose out on a lot of filmmaking opportunities.
5. Negative Public Perception
   Artificial intelligence has played a role in filmmaking for decades. However, generative AI is a fairly new and highly controversial development, with some films facing significant backlash for its use.⁵ This has led some productions, such as Avatar: Fire and Ash, to publicly emphasize that no generative AI was used in their filmmaking process.⁶
6. The Environmental Toll of AI
   Generative AI feels effortless to use, but behind the scenes, the servers consume a whole lot of energy and water. As the world continues to face environmental challenges, grid failures, and water shortages, it’s important to consider the environmental price of using generative AI.

Storyboarding is a fundamental tool in the world of visual storytelling, enabling filmmakers to shape their imaginative ideas into cohesive and compelling narratives. It can be a key component of the pre-production process, saving time and money on set by effectively communicating creative intent to departments and the crew. While AI technologies offer even more time-saving storyboarding opportunities to filmmakers, it’s also important to weigh the creative and ethical impilcations of generative AI.