Week 6 -Directing --What is a Story Board?

What is Storyboarding, and Why is it Useful?

On big video productions there may be as many as a hundred people on set at once, which means that every second a director spends stroking his chin and wondering about where the camera ought to be placed he's paying a hundred people to stand around and watch him. This is something that motivates a film's backers to make sure that there are no moments during shooting when everybody who's getting paid to work isn't working. One of the ways that directors, producers, art designers, and directors of photography make sure that everything is worked out before the cast and crew actually get to the set and minimize standing-around time is to use storyboards.

Storyboards are typically a sort of comic book style illustration of the entire movie, or sometimes just difficult scenes in a movie, including camera angles and the motion of actors through the sets. Lots of storyboard excerpts have made their way onto the Internet; Google can help you track down many of them.

Spectacularly popular movies, such as Star Wars or Kurosawa's war epic Ran, may have their storyboards published as books. Many other movies will show some of the storyboards in the special features section of the DVD - often with side-by-side comparisons of the original storyboards and the final film. Lots of storyboarding tips and storyboard examples can be seen on line on websites like YouTube. There's also a plethora of writing about storyboarding in this history of Hollywood.


One very famous champion of the storyboard is Alfred Hitchcock. Rita Riggs, the costume designer for Psycho, discusses the director's affectation for extensive storyboarding in Stephen Rebello's book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, saying: "The real difference working with Hitchcock and his circle was that you had an entire, cohesive picture laid out before you on storyboards. He truly used storyboards to convey his ideas and desires to all his different craftsmen. You knew every angle in the picture, so there was not a lot of time wasted talking an item to death. We also didn't have to waste time worrying about things like shoes, for instance, because we knew he wasn't going to show them in the shot."

Other directors, such as the award-winning filmmaker and documentarian Werner Herzog, find storyboards constraining and an impediment to the free flow of creativity - Herzog is quoted as saying "storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix..."
Whatever your ultimate opinion of their usefulness, they are part of the cinematic vocabulary.