A storyboard is a sequence of drawings that shows, shot by shot, how a film, video, ad, or animation will play out. Each frame is one shot: what the camera sees, how big the subject is in frame, how the camera moves, and what is said or heard. Read in order, the boards let everyone on a production see the finished piece before a single minute is filmed.
Why productions storyboard
Boards are a communication tool first and a drawing exercise second. A director uses them to explain coverage to the cinematographer; a producer uses them to estimate how many setups a day will need; an editor uses them to understand how scenes are meant to cut together. They are also the cheapest place to find problems. Discovering that a scene needs a reverse angle you never planned costs an eraser on paper and half a day on set.
Storyboards are not only for big productions. A YouTube creator planning a ten-shot intro, an agency pitching a thirty-second spot, and a student shooting a short all benefit from deciding the shots before the camera is rolling. You do not need to draw well — clear stick figures with good notes beat beautiful drawings that leave the shot ambiguous.
What goes in a storyboard frame
- The image — the framing of the shot, drawn inside a frame that matches your delivery aspect ratio (16:9 for most video, 2.39:1 for widescreen film, 9:16 for vertical social video).
- A shot number, so everyone can refer to "shot 14" without ambiguity. Many productions number by scene and shot (12A, 12B).
- The shot type — wide, medium, close-up, over the shoulder. Our guide to shot types covers the standard abbreviations.
- Camera movement — a pan, a push in, a crane up — usually drawn as arrows on the frame and written in the notes.
- Action and dialogue — a line or two describing what happens, plus the lines, voice-over, music, or sound cues that play over the shot.
- Duration, especially for ads and animation, where the total running time is fixed.
How to make a storyboard, step by step
1. Break the script into beats. Read the scene and mark every moment where something changes: a new piece of information, a reaction, a movement, a cut in location. Each beat is a candidate shot.
2. Write a rough shot list. For each beat, decide the shot size and angle in words before drawing anything: "WS — Maya exits the elevator", "CU — her hand on the keycard". It is much faster to rearrange words than drawings.
3. Choose your format. Pick the aspect ratio of the final video and a board layout. A sheet of six 16:9 frames is the workhorse; thumbnail sheets with nine small frames are good for a first pass; one frame per page suits client presentations. Ready-made layouts like the 16:9 widescreen template and the 9:16 vertical template save you the setup.
4. Thumbnail quickly. Sketch every frame small and fast. You are solving staging — who is where, which way they face, how one shot leads into the next — not rendering.
5. Refine and annotate. Redraw the frames that matter, add movement arrows, and fill in the notes. Check screen direction: if a character exits frame right, they should usually enter the next shot from frame left, or the cut will feel like a jump.
6. Share and revise. Export the boards as a PDF for the team, collect notes, and rework. Boards are a draft of the edit, so expect them to change.
Storyboards, animatics, and comics
An animatic is a storyboard cut to time — the frames played in sequence with the soundtrack, so you can feel the pacing. Animation studios lean on animatics heavily because every second of finished animation is expensive. Comics share a lot of DNA with storyboards: both break a story into framed moments. The difference is that a comic page is designed to be read as a finished page, with panels of many shapes, while a storyboard is a plan for moving pictures where every frame shares the camera's shape. If you make comics, our guide on laying out a comic page covers the page-design side.
Ready to try it? Start a storyboard in Striply — choose a frame ratio, sketch or drop images into the frames, type notes directly under each shot, and export a print-ready PDF. It is free and needs no account.