5 Ways to Storyboard Your Film

The popular opinion is that a film is made thrice. First on the writing table, second during principal photography, and third on the edit table. However, I think a film is made four times: screenplay, storyboard, shoot, and edit. The storyboard is the next powerful thing after the script and it can make or break your film. A storyboard is the ultimate show-and-tell tool for a filmmaker to craft and share their creative vision with the crew, cast, and other stakeholders.

There are numerous benefits to storyboarding your film. First things first, it helps you translate the screenplay and your vision into a visual format — one which can be understood by one and all, razing down cultural and language barriers. It helps your crew to plan accordingly for every shot, well in advance during the pre-production phase and not put them in an awkward and confused position on the day of the shoot. This saves time, money, and energy as your principal photography gains from a clear visual blueprint.

Storyboards also help crew and cast to research, plan, and create richer creative possibilities about what goes into the shot and what doesn't. The storyboard is your opportunity to work on the staging and blocking in every shot. The blueprint is a guide that improves team communication, aligned vision, and a shared language with the entire film unit. There's plenty of upside to storyboarding your film and you should do it by all means. Time and financial constraints are not an excuse and we'll discuss east and resourceful ways to storyboard, even if you are broke.

By creating your shots in the form a storyboard, you can easily collaborate with your cinematographer and key crew on the kind of camera rigs and lighting setups you would need during production. You can prototype rigs, do sample shoots, and explore the practical viability of shots early on and iterate on your entire shot design with zero cost. All shots need to add a distinct value to your film, the theme, and objectives of your film.

It's also a good idea to print storyboards as spiral books and distribute copies for easy reference and personal note-taking. Another practice is to paste them on a wall in your production office or on set, turning your creative brainstorming sessions into an immersive and inclusive experience for the best outcomes.

I strongly believe that principal photography should be exclusively reserved for enabling and extracting the creative potential of both the cast and crew, and not for the crew to be in a clueless and helpless state on what's being produced. The visual blueprint aka storyboard exists to empower you with the right set of tools, mindset, and most importantly the space to execute your plan on set.

“For Duel, the entire movie was storyboarded. I had the art director sketch the picture on a mural that arced around the motel room. It was an aerial view that showed all the scenes and the dead ends and the chases and all the exciting moments. I think when you make an action film, especially a road picture, it’s the best way to work, because it’s very hard to pick up a script and sift through five hundred words of prose and then commit them to memory. The movie was more of a concept than a page-by-page description of what had to be shot, so I felt that breaking the picture up and mapping it out would be easier for me.” — Steven Spielberg

Let's look at 5 ways you can create storyboards.

1) Freehand Drawing

You don't need to be an artist to draw and craft your shots in a storyboard. The storyboard is a means to an end and not the end in itself. (In some cases it can be an end too, as you can turn your storyboard into a book and sell it, after you have made a blockbuster film the world might want to see it.) If you're good at drawing, do it by all means, to the level of detailing that your film demands.

If you're not a great artist, you can draw simple stick figures that work and are understood by all. You're selling the film and not your sketches, in most cases. So, be brave and draw whatever you can on paper or use the plethora of digital drawing tools. Whatever works for you! Just freehand drawing works best at times. The idea is to see your vision in a visual format and start conversations with your cinematographer, gaffer, assistant directors, and other technicians. They are not interested in your drawing skills, and focused on the shot.

2) Storyboard Artist

This is more of a traditional route if you have all the time and money in the world. This is going to cost significant amount of time, money, and narrative investment between the director and the storyboard artist in tandem. However, if you have the money, this is the best route. Hiring professionals for this work can improve your film quality as there's lot of detailing in the shots, which is helpful for both cast and crew.

3) Software Assistance

Leverage software tools to create your storyboards from existing templates, generative AI tools, where you can upload your script and shots are generated. This is obvious and nothing to be discussed here. If software works for you, go for it. You can also use your drawings and creative animatics or use pre-visualisation tools for complex shots.

4) Take Photographs (Director's Viewfinder)

Use your phone camera or a digital camera to take photographs of your desired shots. You can seek the help of your crew or friends to be stand-ins. Visit your locations and take pictures or videos in context. This gives you a good perspective on potential challenges as well as new creative opportunities with staging and blocking. Once you have these pictures, you can place them in a storyboard format.

Here are few apps that works as a Director's viewfinder. You can capture images with metadata and use them in your storyboarding efforts. While some apps have a built in sketch effect LUT pack, you can also choose to convert photos to sketches using other software. Here's a software for your reference.

To illustrate this method, I took some photographs using the Finder Kit app. You can choose the camera system and desired lens. The app also captures focal length info, location, date and time stamp for planning your production. Some apps also help you export these photos in a storyboard format.

Finder Kit App

Magic Arri ViewFinder App

5) Shot Libraries

There are several websites and apps that maintain a repository of shots from the world of movies, television, commercials, and music. You can use both simple and advanced search features on these websites to find the shot that you want to use as a reference for your film. This is a great method to build storyboard and also study shots from a staging, blocking, and lighting perspective as well. You can search some websites, using various filters like lens type, shot type, lighting, colour, genre, country, etc.

The fundamental challenge with these images is you might not have a coherent storyboard as the shots appear from various sources, however they help you in so many other ways to create a rudimentary storyboard and begin interesting conversations with your crew.

I have listed few websites that can add great value to your film. (There's only one rule: Always be original and true to yourself in your artistic endeavours.)

You can mix and match these five storyboarding approaches for the best results that suit your given context. For example, you can take shots from the library websites and then provide these to an artist as a reference or draw them and enhance them further to suit your film.

Now, let's talk about the detailing. Elements you should ideally include in your storyboard. Descriptive detailing for each shot helps to enhance the purpose what you just created. Or else, your storyboard can be interpreted in ways you might not actually want it to. For example, not mentioning camera movement can only create further questions or not mentioning a lens type can complicate procurement, rig development and the entire production planning as such.

It's best to have essential elements in as much detail as possible for every shot. However excessive detailing on production design, costume design, etc can probably be as additional notes or some other form of documentation, and not within in the storyboard as such.

10 elements you should add to every shot in your storyboard

Shot Number
Shot Description
Shot Type
Lens Type
Camera Angle
Camera Movement
Character Movement
Props
Lighting
Dialogue / Sound

Resources

Free Storyboard templates (1)

Free Storyboard Templates (2)

How to Make a Storyboard: Movie Storyboarding Examples - eBook

Storyboarding 101: The Importance of Visual Scripting - eBook

Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) Storyboard

Book: The Art Of Movie Storyboards Visualising The Action Of The World's Greatest Films

Steven Spielberg on Storyboarding

Storyboarding Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963)

Storyboarding Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

Parasite (2019) Storyboarding analysis

Shot construction, using juxtaposition of uninflected images as cuts enable the audience to find meaning. It's helpful to know the Kuleshov Effect and Eisenstein Intellectual Montage and leverage these principles at the storyboard stage of filmmaking.

Disclaimer: Links are provided in best interest of the reader. The Author is not responsible for the accuracy of links and the usage of the mentioned information.

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