This comprehensive tutorial breaks down the essential techniques for creating professional-grade storyboards, even without advanced drawing skills. Shai, an AI-powered storyboard generator, can help quickly visualize scenes and accelerate the pre-production process.
## Transcript Below
Hi guys, in this video I want to talk about how to do the best storyboards you can. Now I want to start off by dispelling two myths: one, you need to be a great artist to be great at storyboarding – I don’t believe this at all. And two, there’s a right and a wrong way to storyboard. Use storyboard however you need to.
In this video, I’m going to show you two different ways of storyboarding, but in both examples they would absolutely get an A grade. So for those of you here for the quick answer, I want to know what the golden rule is for a great storyboard. It’s simple: **a good storyboard is one that you can watch** – one that you can absolutely experience beyond just what the camera angle is and what happens. What can you hear? What’s the lighting like? It needs to have all of the details that you would need in the full film.
### The Martin Scorsese Approach
It’s like Martin Scorsese said in this quote: “The storyboard for me is the way to visualize the entire movie in advance.” I had to think what he means by that. Before the expense of getting all of your crew and your equipment on set, which could be so expensive, it’s a way of seeing every single shot with the music, with the lighting, and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.
Peter Jackson did this absolutely loads during the Lord of the Rings and even went to the extent of hiring voice actors so that he could watch the entire film in storyboard before he even pressed the record button.
### Two Different Approaches for Different Skill Levels
So bear in mind, you’re all gonna have very different levels of artistic ability. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna draw this twice. I’m gonna draw it once for people who have slightly more of a visual way of working, and for people who genuinely believe they have no artistic ability, I’m gonna do another version where we’ll be relying more on text.
Now these are two storyboards that I’ve made. There are tons of templates online, but I like these ones because it allows you to adapt it most of all to your style. So here we’re going to be putting most of the information in the frame, here we’re going to be making loads and loads of notes down the side.
### Visual Storyboarding Method
Now we need to have something to storyboard, so what I want to do is do this back to front. Let’s watch this clip from Jurassic Park and just have a think beyond just the camera and what happens – what are the different elements that we’re gonna have to translate from moving image into a two-dimensional print format?
So let’s take a look at how we would do this visually. In this one, I’m going to try and draw with as much artistic ability as I can, which isn’t actually that much. I’m going to draw the whole scene including the movement of the camera – everything that we see when the frame starts and everything that we see when it finishes.
### Including Essential Details
Here I’ve tried to draw the entire scene. We need to include things like **lighting**. When you consider how we’re going to show the fact that there’s like an awful lot of shadows on the wall and very low-key lighting, if you’ve got the artistic confidence, you can kind of literally just show where shadows will be.
**Don’t be afraid to write on the frame itself.** So we’ve got low-key lighting that focuses on the characters. If there’s anything on here that’s not entirely sure what it is, like this kind of counter that’s not entirely obvious, I’ve done it very sketchy just to show that you really don’t need that artistic ability.
**Don’t be afraid to label things.** We’ve got girl, boy, raptors, counter. In other words, make it absolutely clear to the person looking at your storyboard – assuming it’s not you – what it is they’re looking at. It might make perfect sense to you, but it’s got to make sense in the context of this video to the person marking your work.
### Camera Movement and Framing
The next thing that we need to talk about is the way that the camera works. Now I’ve drawn this from the perspective that I want the character being, but don’t forget there was that camera movement – it did that kind of dolly type crane thing that moved down as well.
So what you can also do is literally draw on the frame how the camera moves. Here the first frame started around about here and it ended with that kind of mid close-up of the boy and the girl. And what I’m going to do now is just show how that movement goes.
So you can see this one is all about the visuals. We’ve now got our starting frame and how it actually pans down to our finishing frame. Obviously I’ve done this very sketchy, I’ve done it very scribbly – I’m not trying to be impressive at all.
This tutorial demonstrates that effective storyboarding is more about clear communication and planning than artistic perfection. The key is to convey your vision in a way that others can understand and execute.