Intro to Shai
With Shai’s AI Storyboard Generator, filmmakers and creatives can instantly turn scripts into detailed, visually clear storyboards—no advanced drawing skills required. Whether your vision is rough sketches or detailed frames, Shai helps you plan and share your film ideas with precision.
Summary of video
This video breaks down the basics of storyboarding, covering panels, shot composition, camera movement, and how to clearly convey ideas to a production team. It emphasizes that artistic skill isn’t essential—clarity is—and shows alternative pre-visualization techniques like animatics, pre-vis videos, and photographic storyboards. The focus is on using whatever tools best communicate your vision before filming.
Hey guys, I’m Kevin. You might know me as the sound guy at RocketJump Film School, but I’ve also storyboarded some of our shorts and shows.
I’m going to share some of the basics about storyboarding with you today.
Storyboards are illustrations that represent the shots that will ultimately make up a movie.
They allow you to build the world of your film before you actually build it.
There aren’t any strict, exacting rules on how to do storyboards—conveying information is what’s important.
Storyboards are ultimately a technical document, a tool.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re a skilled illustrator or not.
This… can work just as well as this.
Even if you struggle with perspective, or can barely draw a stick figure, you can still convey what types of shots you want, and their basic composition.
Who storyboards?
Typically, the director sits down with a storyboard artist to help articulate their vision.
However, it’s not uncommon for cinematographers and production designers to join in the process as well.
At RocketJump, I usually meet with the director, and produce rough thumbnail sketches that summarize the important information in each panel.
Then afterward I’ll fill in the details on my own, meeting with the director once again after completing the panels to make sure everything works.
We’ll then share the completed panels with the rest of the team.
So let’s break down the parts of a storyboard.
The panel, or frame, is a rectangle that represents what the camera will see.
Panels come in a bunch of different shapes. Pick a panel shape that matches your shooting aspect ratio.
Square… widescreen… really, really widescreen.
A person drawn really small in the panel is a wide or establishing shot.
A big head taking up half the panel is a close-up.
Deciding where you put the person in your frame is the basis of your composition.
This may seem really basic, but this has a huge impact on how you prepare for your shoot.
These illustrations give your cinematographer a starting point.
Things like camera angles, lighting, depth of field—the whole gamut of decisions—can be informed by the storyboards.
It’s also a great way to decide what you’ll need out of your locations.
Do you really need a giant bottomless pit?
Or can you get away with one visual effects wide shot, and then cover the rest in tighter shots?
Okay! Let’s talk about arrows!
Now that we have a panel with a character in it, let’s say that character is moving to the left.
By drawing an arrow pointing to the left, we show where that character… or door… or dinosaur… is moving.
There’s no real rule to drawing arrows, and everyone has their own personal style, but what’s important is that your arrows are easy to read and make sense.
Here are some examples of arrows:
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Arrows for characters moving towards camera.
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Arrows for characters moving away from camera.
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This character is kneeling down.
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And this character’s head is falling off.
Arrows within the panel usually mean a subject is moving in the shot.
Arrows around the edges usually imply some sort of camera movement.
So here… the raptor lunges RIGHT… and the camera pans LEFT.
Now let’s talk about camera movement.
Camera movement arrows also aren’t really standardized, but let’s go over some common ways camera movement is illustrated.
Dolly movements are typically drawn with one arrow, often narrowing a little bit to suggest movement in or out of 3D space.
Both dolly shots and zooms can also be illustrated by placing arrows in all four corners of the panel.
This shows a widening… or narrowing… of perspective.
You can draw a panel within your panel to show how far your dolly or zoom goes.
Clearly conveying information is key, so it’s better to over-explain than to confuse people.
Pans are often shown with an arrow on the side of the panel, either pointing to the left… or to the right.
Tilts up and down are done much the same way, except with the arrows at the top or bottom of the panel.
You can also elongate the panel to fit the entire shot in a single drawing.
Since this can get a little confusing, it’s okay to make a note indicating whether or not the shot is tracking versus panning, or dollying versus zooming—because arrows are often used the same way in both instances.
You can make your notes beside the panel, or in the arrow itself.
Sometimes you’ll need more than one drawing to illustrate what’s happening in a single shot, especially if it’s a really complicated action or camera movement.
When you take panels with angle, composition, on-screen movement, and camera movement, and then combine these panels into a sequence, you have the foundation of your movie.
Storyboards are particularly useful for preparing scenes that require multiple effects techniques.
For this scene from Truck Flipper vs. Bus Puncher, we used storyboards to decide what was going to be stunts, what was going to be practical on-set special effects, what was going to be green screen, and what was going to be CGI—based on exactly what kind of action was needed in each specific shot.
Without planning ahead, a scene like this would have been impossible to shoot in the amount of time we had available.
Storyboards are typically created based off a completed script, but if you’re doing a story that’s extremely visual, storyboards essentially can be your script—like with Mad Max: Fury Road.
Since it’s such a visual film, the beats were more effectively planned out with pictures than with text on a page.
While this is an extreme example, this holds true for preparing all visually complex scenes.
There are also plenty of other alternatives to storyboarding.
Stanley Kubrick used actual photos from his location scouts to find his compositions.
It’s also worth mentioning that filmmakers who’ve adapted comics and graphic novels often use the original artwork essentially as storyboards for the final film.
You can make animatics of your sequences on your computer, to include motion and timing.
You can also videotape your pre-vis, which is really useful for complex action.
You don’t need the actual set, costumes, or magical flying speeder bikes to test out your ideas.
In the original Star Wars, George Lucas used real WWII documentary footage to help pre-visualize the space battles.
Animation has also been used to help capture complex sequences.
Jurassic Park used stop-motion animation to pre-visualize the dinosaur scenes.
When the decision was made to use CGI in the final film, they had already planned ahead in painstaking detail, and knew exactly what specific movements the CGI was going to need to do.
By the time Peter Jackson did The Lord of the Rings trilogy, digital technology had developed to the point where they were able to motion capture the cave troll sequence, and then move a digital camera around in 3D space to pre-visualize the entire scene in a virtual setting.
There are no hard and fast rules, or one way to do it.
But the ultimate goal is planning and clear communication.
So whatever tool is going to help you prepare and share your vision the most—use it!
It will pay off when you get to set, and will help empower you to make the best film possible.
If you have any questions, or would like to share some of your own storyboards, please visit our forums.
I’ll see you next time guys.
…Hope you didn’t get… “board!”