This practical guide breaks down professional storyboarding techniques, from creating proper panel ratios to showing camera movements and handling complex action scenes. The key principle: keep drawings simple but clear, focusing on communicating ideas rather than creating polished artwork, while using techniques like value separation and overhead planning for complex sequences. For filmmakers and animators ready to streamline their pre-production process, Shai can help quickly transform your vision into professional storyboard panels.
Storyboarding is the planning of shots for a film, TV show or anything else that is similar.
This is done for both live action and animation and helps the people in later stages of production know where characters go, what should happen and where the camera should be positioned or moved for each shot.
If you’re ever planning an animation or video project of your own, you can make storyboards for yourself.
Planning in this way makes a big difference in the final results of a project, so here’s everything you should know to get started.
Start by creating boxes with the ratio you need.
You may want to leave room underneath each for notes.
There are some programs for storyboarding that will help you in this process, but for now it’s really not difficult to work in your preferred art program.
Nowadays most industry storyboarders will work digitally, but you’re also welcome to use paper if you find that easiest.
Each of our panels here is a camera shot.
Draw simple but clear.
Avoid unimportant details and don’t aim for perfection.
The goal is to communicate an idea, not make a finished masterpiece.
Characters should be recognizable and distinguishable from one another but should also be very simplified.
Color isn’t important and most storyboards are grayscale, but it’s often helpful to color code characters like I did here for a short film project.
You can use lighter and darker values to separate background, middle ground and foreground elements.
Sometimes one panel will be enough for one shot, but you’ll often need multiple to clearly show the action taking place.
There are many ways you can do this, but I recommend putting scene or shot above the panel or in your notes area below.
Every time there would be a camera cut, you can update that number.
The number staying the same means that the shot is still going.
You may also want to include action notes which describe the action taking place if needed.
This is mostly to help the people who will be using the storyboard later in a production, but it also doesn’t hurt to leave these types of notes for yourself working on a personal project.
And finally for your notes, include dialogue if anything is being said in that scene.
For working digital, I recommend using a solid hard-edged brush with a taper.
Professional storyboarders will be very decisive and clear with the lines they make, not usually being too messy and sketchy.
Of course your standards don’t have to be quite so high if the storyboards are just for you to see, but regardless, line confidence and accuracy is a good skill to learn for art in general.
To show camera movement, the most common method is to create a duplicate panel that is either dotted or a lighter color frame.
The original panel is where the camera starts and the second should go where the camera stops.
Add these connecting lines to show more clearly how the camera is moving.
If the camera is zooming in or out, do the same thing but with a larger or smaller second panel.
For planning complicated action with multiple elements moving about, you can try doing this overhead style of storyboarding.
Rather than planning the camera shots, this is planning where everything should be and all of the actions, movements and events in the space.
This is most helpful for action scenes with a lot of characters and different things going on at once.
This example is very intimidating, but they don’t always have to be this complex.
If you’re ready to move on to animation, give these tutorials on screen to watch next.
Thanks for watching.