Storyboard

• 1. Introduction

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  The storyboard's roots trace to a decision made at Walt Disney Productions in the early 1930s. Disney had grasped something most studios missed. Audiences would not watch a film unless its story gave them a reason to care about the characters. A storyboard is a graphic organizer of sequential illustrations, designed to pre-visualize a motion picture, animation, or interactive media sequence before production begins. Within a decade of its invention, the tool had crossed from animation into live-action cinema. And then it kept going. How a bulletin board trick became indispensable across industries, and what it became along the way, is a story worth tracing.

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• 2. The First Story Department

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  Webb Smith, an animator at Walt Disney Productions, is credited by Walt Disney himself with the invention of the storyboard. His idea was elemental: draw scenes on separate sheets of paper and pin them to a bulletin board in sequence. A competing account, preserved by Pete Docter and Don Peri in their 2024 book Directing at Disney, names Ted Sears instead. Sears reportedly developed the concept while at Fleischer Studios, found no interest there, then joined Walt Disney Productions and introduced the idea to Disney directly.

  Before storyboards, each animator was simply assigned a scene and told to invent gags around a theme. There was no mechanism to ensure those gags worked together as a coherent narrative. The first complete storyboards were created for Three Little Pigs, a Disney short released in 1933. So records Diane Disney Miller in The Story of Walt Disney, her biography of her father, published by Henry Holt in 1956. John Canemaker's 1999 book Paper Dreams, published by Hyperion Press, traces an even earlier lineage. Comic book-like story sketches, created in the 1920s, were already being used to develop ideas for animated shorts such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie.

  Walt Disney also established the first dedicated story department, recognizing that storyboard artists were a distinct profession, separate from animators. Walter Lantz Productions was the second studio to adopt storyboards, switching over in early 1935. Harman-Ising and Leon Schlesinger Productions followed by 1936. By 1937 or 1938, every American animation studio had made the transition. Christopher Finch, writing in The Art of Walt Disney in 1995, attributed the invention to Webb Smith. Dick Huemer, quoted in Pete Docter and Don Peri's 2024 Directing at Disney, credited Ted Sears. That one difference of testimony has kept the question open for eight decades.

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• 3. Live-Action Takes It Up

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  Gone with the Wind, released in 1939, was among the first live-action films to be completely storyboarded. Production designer William Cameron Menzies was hired by producer David O. Selznick to design every shot. That level of pre-planned visual coverage was unusual for live-action productions of the era.

  Storyboarding grew popular in live-action film production during the early 1940s and became a standard tool for previsualization. Pace Gallery curator Annette Micheloson wrote about the exhibition Drawing into Film: Director's Drawings. She described the 1940s through the 1990s as the period when production design was largely defined by the storyboard's adoption.

  Scenes in a motion picture are rarely filmed in the order they appear in the script. Individual shots within a single scene are often captured out of order and on different days. Directors use storyboards on set to quickly recall the intended effect of each shot, without needing to reread the script while cast and crew wait. Film editors can also use a completed storyboard at the rough-cut stage. It helps them assemble a preliminary version of the film before all footage has been shot.

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• 4. Animatics and Photomatics

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  In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage is often followed by simplified mock-ups called animatics. At its simplest, an animatic displays storyboard images in sequence, synchronized with rough dialogue or a scratch soundtrack. Directors and animators use these previews to work out problems in camera positioning, shot ordering, and timing before committing to full production.

  The financial stakes behind this process are significant. In traditional animation, a few minutes of finished film typically represent months of work for a team of artists. If a scene does not work in the final cut, the labor already paid for must be written off. Catching the problem at the animatic stage avoids that loss. In computer animation, the same logic applies. Unnecessary scene components and models need not be constructed if the storyboard review shows they will never appear in the frame.

  Animatics are also used by advertising agencies to test commercials inexpensively. A variation called the rip-o-matic uses clips from existing films, television programs, or commercials. It simulates the look and feel of a proposed advertisement. A related format, the photomatic, replaces drawn frames with a sequence of still photographs, combined with sound effects, voice-overs, and music. Photomatics function primarily as research tools, tested with audiences before a full production budget is committed.

  Digital photography and non-linear editing software gave rise to the term "digimatic" for digitally assembled photomatics. The Photomatic name also had a separate commercial life. The International Mutoscope Reel Company of New York City manufactured coin-operated photo booths under the Photomatic brand. Each coin produced a strip of four photographs. Some feature film DVD releases include production animatics as bonus material. These occasionally preserve vocals from the actual cast, recorded before a scene was cut from production.

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• 5. Beyond the Screen

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  Konstantin Stanislavski developed storyboards as part of his detailed production plans for the Moscow Art Theatre. His 1898 staging of Chekhov's The Seagull is among the documented examples. Bertolt Brecht, the German director and dramatist, incorporated detailed storyboards into his dramaturgical method of "fabels." Their use in theatre challenges the assumption that storyboarding belongs exclusively to film.

  Novelists have adopted the tool as well. Most novelists structure their work by scene rather than by chapter. A storyboard helps them plot a sequence of events and rearrange scenes before the structure is fixed.

  Storyboards used in advertising and corporate communication carry a specific name: presentation boards. These differ from shooting boards in quality and intent. They need to convey expression, layout, and mood, because their purpose is persuasion rather than production instruction. Some consulting firms teach the technique to their own staff. They employ a method called the "brown paper technique," in which draft presentation slides are taped in sequence to a large sheet of kraft paper. That paper can then be rolled up for easy transport.

  Activity-based costing, the accounting method known as ABC, uses storyboards to build detailed process flowcharts. These charts visualize all activities and their relationships, helping organizations measure resource costs and identify waste. Design comics, popularized by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao in 2006, place customers into narrative scenarios to guide website design or product planning.

  Linguistic fieldwork researchers use storyboards to elicit spoken language. A researcher presents a simplified graphical depiction of a situation to an informant and asks them to describe it or retell its story. The recorded speech becomes data for linguistic analysis. A variant called the "quality storyboard" exists specifically to guide quality improvement processes within organizations, adding another specialized term to the storyboard's vocabulary.

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• 6. Building the Boards

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  Orson Welles, directing Citizen Kane, created storyboards that his cinematographers initially considered impossible to film. Alfred Hitchcock did the same for North by Northwest. Both directors imagined shots with extreme depth of field and camera angles where there appeared to be no room for equipment. In each case, creative solutions were found to achieve what the director had drawn.

  Storyboard creation begins with a template: a grid of blank rectangles matched to the aspect ratio of the video format the film will use. From these, directors often sketch rough "thumbnail" storyboards, sometimes directly into the margins of a script. These small, rough drawings are named for their size, and for some productions they are sufficient.

  When more detailed boards are needed, professional storyboard artists work in two or three dimensions. Two-dimensional boards convey mood, lighting, and composition. Three-dimensional boards, sometimes called technical previsualization, show exactly what the camera will see using the same lenses planned for production. The downside of three-dimensional previsualization is the time required to build and render each shot.

  The art style of a storyboard varies with the scene's demands. Fast-paced action sequences may need only monochrome line art. Slower dramatic scenes with complex lighting may call for color impressionist drawings, giving the cinematographer a clearer sense of the scene's intended mood.

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