Short answers, pulled from the story.
Walt Disney Productions introduced the storyboard method to animation in 1933. Animator Webb Smith created the first sequential visual tool by pinning scenes to a bulletin board during the production of the short film Three Little Pigs. This method transformed the chaotic energy of early animation into a disciplined narrative engine.
The first live-action film to be completely storyboarded was Gone with the Wind in 1939. Production designer William Cameron Menzies designed every single shot of the film for producer David O. Selznick. This level of pre-visualization was unprecedented for a live-action drama and included detailed drawings that dictated camera angles, lighting, and actor blocking.
A storyboard consists of a series of still images that look like a comic book of the film produced beforehand. An animatic is a sequence of still images from a storyboard displayed in sync with rough dialogue or scratch vocals to show motion and timing. Editing at the animatic stage helps a production avoid wasting time and resources on animation that would otherwise be edited out of the film.
In software development, storyboards identify specifications for a particular set of software by drawing screens to illustrate the important steps of the user experience. In linguistic fieldwork, storyboards elicit spoken language by presenting an informant with a simplified graphical depiction of a situation or story. It is cheaper to make changes to a storyboard than to an implemented piece of software, making it an invaluable tool for user interface design.
Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock created storyboards that were initially thought by cinematographers to be impossible to film. In Citizen Kane and North by Northwest, the directors envisioned shots with impossible depth of field and angles where there was no room for the camera. Creative solutions were found to achieve these ground-breaking shots that the director had envisioned.