All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Now that you’ve come up with a great plot, one or two strong characters, and an idea for your overall art direction, it’s time to start figuring out how your storyline is going to flow visually. Your first opportunity to do this is by drawing storyboards. A set of storyboard panels is like a preliminary comic-book version of a film (see Figure 1).

Storyboards are the bridges between a written script and the visual world of cinema. If you wrote out your story in script form, hopefully you imagined how each scene and action would look onscreen. If not, read through your story again and try to picture the best possible way to stage each story beat.

Staging refers to the ways in which individual story beats or actions are clearly presented in visual terms. Effective staging comes from a successful combination of camera angles, point of view, composition and placement of characters and objects.

[Figure 1] Storyboards are like comic book panels describing the events of your plot progression.

[Figure 2] Storyboards can range from extremely rough to beautifully refined works of art.

The first step in realizing your ideas for how your story will translate into cinematic imagery is by getting them down on paper as storyboard panels. Storyboards can be quick and extremely rough little sketches, often referred to as thumbnails, or they can be carefully crafted works of art in their own right (see Figure 2). The level of refinement of your storyboards will depend on the structure of your team, your drawing skills and your deadline. If you are working alone, you can make them as rough as you want as long as you understand your own visual shorthand. If you are working with a team, they should be a bit more refined.

Although it is tempting to overproduce your storyboard panels into fine works of art that will look impressive when featured in the documentary on the making of your film, don’t inadvertently slow down your production by focusing too much attention on what are often considered little more than throwaway templates and staging suggestions. Your storyboard images should be refined enough for you and your teammates to be able to read and interpret them clearly, but rough enough so that your schedule does not suffer unnecessarily.

Also, the style of your drawings should match the overall art direction that you are envisioning for your film. If you are creating a goofball comedy with exaggerated characters, try to draw your boards in a similar fashion. If the visual elements of your film are to be abstract or symbolic, it is neither appropriate nor necessary to draw realistic characters on your boards.

Why Storyboard?
Since you are in the process of creating a film rather than a piece of literature, it is not enough to simply work out the beats of your story on the written page. Cinema is a primarily visual medium; therefore, working out your narrative flow with pictures rather than mere words is often a necessary step in discovering if and how your written or imagined storyline will translate into film. Storyboarding allows you to begin figuring out the best way to express each story beat visually.