Storyboard 101, You’re going to love this!

A storyboard is a visual representation of a film. A sequence that breaks down the action into individual panels is storyboarding. It is a series of ordered drawings. Camera direction, dialogue, or other pertinent details must go in. The storyboard also sketches out how a video will unfold. All shot by shot.

You could say the storyboard is a trial run for your finished film, video, or commercial laid out in a comic book-like form. Directors and producers love it! It saves time and money on production. Live-action films, animated films, t.v series all use storyboards. You should be reading and understanding the film process with books that use storyboard vocabulary.   Storyboard art is similar to comic books so make sure you read plenty of comics too! Marvel, DC, any kind of comic!  Reading comics is not something that new students do these days! So get your hands on a great stack of comics!

What kind of things do I need to know for this storyboarding class?

For starters, you should have a basic understanding of drawing and sketching.  Storyboard artists, usually are really good draftsmen. You should be familiar with perspective and layout drawing as well as figure drawing and animals drawing. Don’t worry, people use stick figures to make quick storyboards, you just need to be able to communicate with your drawings. Most if not all students (unless they read a lot of comics) do the most boring bland storyboards ever! They choose boring angles and uninteresting shots.  As a result, they get flat dull stories. You need to be watching movies, lots of movies, and reading comics!

This course is the second in our series “Story Telling For Visual Media” and it covers the basics of storyboarding.

Some of the topics covered in this course are :

• Analyzing your favorite films shot by shot
• Analyzing an animated film shot by shot
• Understanding genres
• Breaking down dialog
• Beginning, middle, and end,
• making your own story and scripts
• Storyboarding and short script
• Storyboarding and action sequence

In conclusion and most importantly, storyboarding is visual. Likewise, you must design your stories for a visual medium. Subsequently, even a boring conversation can be interesting. That is to say, if you storyboard it right! For example, two people talking during a rainstorm is uninteresting. However, two people with the camera up high following the rain are dynamic! To clarify, try to think like a comic book artist!