How do film directors, actors, and cinematographers use storyboards? Some examples…

Storyboards are a tool to help you, a film director, get what you want while juggling people, locations, equipment, script pages, money, and chaos during a film shoot.

How do film directors, actors, and cinematographers use storyboards?

In brief, storyboards will help you plan out how you’re going to shoot. This is just as true for short films as for feature length films or TV productions.

Can a storyboard be overkill for some short films? Of course. If you’re just one person shooting with a webcam, you don’t need a storyboard. Just rehearse and record a few takes. Done.

If you don’t yet have much experience  directing films, a well thought out storyboard can get you through that first film production cycle with a lot less mess and trouble.

The more people involved in a film production (actors, crew, extras, animators, voice-over talent, others), the more useful a storyboard is. Even a short film can have quite a few people involved.

The more complex the story, location, props, equipment, and choreography of how these will interact with the actors during the shoot and in the edit suite, the more helpful a storyboard is to keep all the pieces moving toward a coherent result.

What can a storyboard tell you?

• What scenes, reaction shots, and b-roll (pure location footage with no people in frame) get filmed at each location.
• Where the cast will be located at various points in the script (“marks”).
• Which way they’ll be facing at each of those marks.
• Where the camera(s) and mics and so on will be when the actors arrive at their marks.
• The choreography of moving all these players–people and equipment–around the location as a scene progresses.
• Camera angles, reactions, anything special you’re looking for.
• Visualizing time of day and light levels you’ll need can help estimate the windows of time you’ll have at each location to get the shots with the requisite lighting (or darkness).

It saves a ton of time to visualize this before assembling the cast and crew. Storyboards help everyone do that–not just the director.

A storyboard may also fill in visuals that may be vague or absent in the script.

• Will the shoot involve green screens with backgrounds to be filled in during post-production?
• Animation?
• Voice-overs? (especially if the characters onscreen will be able to “hear” those voices)
• Fight choreography?
• Special effects?

A storyboard can help everyone envision the locations, situations, tensions, movement, and emotions you want to realize in the finished piece.

Either on location or in a studio space (or basketball court or whatever), you may want to hold a blocking rehearsal to run everyone through cues and choreography. This isn’t about rehearsing lines, characterization, or any of that. It’s just to see if the choreography (moving people around) works in the physical space (and constraints, like walls and furniture) you’ll have to work with.

In my own collection of short film scripts, I include storyboards for 2 screenplays. I did this not to dictate camera angles, choreography, or pacing — these are all your domain. Basically, I wanted to give you examples of what storyboards can look like, and how they can help you plan out the shooting of the screenplays that will be more complicated to shoot.

Example pages from one of my short film storyboards: