What is a storyboard?

A comic strip of the video

Adobe's guide to storyboarding defines it as a series of drawings that visually tells the story of a screenplay or script, and places it in the pre-visualisation process for everything from Disney cartoons to live action films. The drawings do not need to be good. Stick figures, boxes for products and arrows for movement are enough, because the point is agreement, not art. Each panel stands for a shot or a scene, arranged in viewing order, usually with a caption underneath giving the line being spoken, what moves in the frame and roughly how long the moment lasts.

Storyboard versus script

The two documents answer different questions. The script answers what is said: every line of narration or dialogue and every piece of on screen text, in order. The storyboard answers what is seen while it is said. A single sentence of script can need three panels, a wide shot, a close shot and a detail, while three sentences might play over one held picture. Working from the script alone, a director and a client can each imagine a completely different video and not discover it until the first cut, which is the most expensive moment to find out.

How a storyboard gets used

The storyboard sits between writing and production, and once it is approved it becomes the plan the other documents are drawn from. Adobe's guide notes that a director begins creating the shot list from what the storyboard establishes, turning each panel into shots with a type, an angle and a location. Animators use it to plan layouts and timing. Editors use it to check that the cut matches what was agreed. On a short marketing video the storyboard is often the client sign off document as well, because a client can approve pictures far more confidently than a page of camera directions.

When it is worth drawing one

Almost always for animation, motion graphics and ads, where every frame is designed and nothing is found by accident on the day. Almost always when several people need to agree, such as a client, a designer and a narrator. Less so for an interview, a vlog or a recording of a live event, where the content is discovered while filming and a rough list of intended shots does the job. The bigger the cost of changing a scene later, the more a storyboard is worth, which is why it pays for itself fastest on the most heavily produced work.

Common mistakes

Drawing too much detail too early is the first; polished panels make people reluctant to change them, and change is the whole purpose. The second is storyboarding without timing, so a thirty second ad gets planned with ninety seconds of pictures. The third is forgetting the frame shape: panels drawn wide for a video that will run vertical plan compositions that cannot fit. The fourth is leaving out the audio notes, so nobody can tell whether a panel is covered by narration, music or silence. The fifth is treating the approved board as fixed when the edit reveals a better order.

Where it shows up in the product

The video builder here does not ask for a storyboard. The brief, up to 8,000 characters with up to 8 images and 5 documents attached, is where you describe what each part of the video should cover, and the generator writes the content from it: the template choice, the copy for each slot, the narration script, the scene order and each scene's duration. Layout, motion and timing curves are then applied by the templates rather than invented by the model, so the scene timeline in the builder behaves like a finished storyboard you edit instead of draw. For a tutorial, screen capture supplies the pictures as still frames, one for each press of Capture step, rather than as a recording.

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