The Storyboard

No doubt your mind swirls with little pictures, pictures that represent your ideas.

Capture these "idea pictures" on videotape, and everybody can enjoy them.

But between your first idea-picture and your final cut there's a lot to do-and a lot of it involves people other than yourself.

You must communicate your great ideas to these people, be they clients or camera operators, clearly enough so they see the same pictures you do.

How can you be so sure you're all on the same wavelength?

By getting those idea pictures out of your head and down on paper where everyone can see them.

And that is where the storyboard comes in.

A storyboard is a graphic representation of your video.

Like the comics you see in the newspaper, it consists of a series of pictures illustrating the scenes of your video.

String these scenes all together, and these pictures tell your video's story.

The graphics need not be fancy- hand-drawn stick figures will do. Which is not to discount fancy graphics-from the most elaborately airbrushed fine art to computer-generated images.

Fancy or not, these graphics usually wind up pasted to a large board, the scenes pictured in little boxes corresponding to video's three by four format. Captions underneath each picture describe the audio story...what the characters say, what kind of music plays, what sorts of sound effects bang away in the background.

Obviously, detailed storyboards are not necessary on every video. Rough storyboards suffice for documentaries-there's simply no way to know exactly what scenes you'll capture beforehand. But on dramatic productions involving different actors and locations, a detailed storyboard can help you anticipate and avoid problems on the shoot. Using storyboards before producing commercials and computer animations can mean the difference between money in the bank and lots of costly reshooting.

Say you're shooting a short dramatic piece involving space aliens in the old West. You write the script, and then break the script into scenes, the scenes into shots. You prepare a production schedule. You think you're ready.

You're not. Go ahead and take that extra step. Prepare a storyboard.

You don't have to be Michelangelo to draw these pictures. Stick figures and vague shapes will serve the purpose nicely (as long as you can tell what that blob on this side of the shot is, you're okay).

You draw the first shot. The aliens' space ship descends into Monument Valley. In the next shot, they get out of the ship. Cut to a stagecoach moving swiftly, clouds of dust trailing behind it. James, the driver, whoops wildly and cracks his long whip at the team of sweating horses.

The aliens watch from behind a butte. At the last moment, they jump from their hiding place and try to hold up the stage. Gabby, riding shotgun, lets them have it with both barrels. The aliens go down, splattering green slime. The doctor jumps from the stage and quickly examines one of the creatures. The driver watches expectantly. The doctor looks up at the driver and says hoarsely, "He's dead, Jim." You look over your art work. It's rough, but nonetheless it serves the purpose: you get your idea across.

But as you look closer, a nagging doubt creeps into your mind. Then it comes to you. You planned to use upside-down pie plates for the spaceship. This is fine for the long shot, but you also have a shot of the aliens getting out of the ship. The pie plate may not look so good in that one. You'll need to re-think it.

Also, using the pictures as a guide, you see you're still short a few props- western outfits, a doctor's bag, alien make-up, some horses and oh yeah, a stagecoach. It's better to learn about these problems in the planning stages of your production, rather than when you're out in the field with your technicians and actors.

Okay, so you go out and get all these props, costumes and locations you know you need, thanks to your storyboard. You can now gather together cast and crew to discuss the details of the upcoming shoot.

Using the storyboard, you can show the camera operator how to get close to the ground for the shot where the stagecoach rolls over him. For another shot, he'll need to ride one of the stagecoach horses as he focuses back at the driver. And he'll also need some sort of harness for the overhead shot that simulates the spaceship crash landing. Of course, after reviewing this with him, you may also need a new camera operator.

You can show the actors how you'll cut the different scenes together, so they can get a better understanding of their characters and the motivations for their actions.

"So I shoot my gun at the aliens and not the doctor," the actor playing Gabby says after seeing the storyboard, a point that obviously needed clearing up. However, he still has a question about motivation.

From your perspective as the director of the shoot, the storyboard helps you make sure the shots you've planned will work well together. You have a shot of Jim followed by a similar shot of Gabby. From the storyboard you realize that this might look like a jump cut when you put the two together. You grab a pencil and quickly draw a point of view shot from Jim's perspective of the view from behind the horses.

Now when you cut to Gabby, you not only avoid the jump cut, you make a statement about the grumpy sidekick through the use of juxtaposition.

The professionals have always used storyboards. Alfred Hitchcock planned out his films with storyboards to such degree that he found the actual shooting anticlimactic. He claimed he'd made all the artistic decisions long before the cameras rolled.

Steven Spielberg turns every single shot of his movies into graphics, which he then tacks to the walls of his office.

He moves all of them around as he pleases to see how they will fit together.

These directors don't leave much to chance, a good reason to use storyboards. But many professionals use storyboards for another good reason-money.

"Whenever we shoot live productions here," says Jane Carter, Studio Art Representative of Napoleon Video- graphics, a video and art studio in New York City, "we have our artist storyboard out certain scenes to show the client different ways to shoot the video-including a variety of shot angles and editing cuts. It's easier to make a shooting board to show a client what the director has in mind. It saves a lot of time and lets everyone know they are thinking the same way."

Napoleon Videographics specializes in producing highly polished work in very short turn-around times. The trick is to understand exactly what the customer wants up front.

"Most of the time we deal with advertising agencies," Carter said, "they're our biggest clients. They come in with their ideas and we go over those ideas with them. Once we know what theywant, we transfer these instructions to the artist drawing the storyboard.

Clients usually have an idea of how they want the board to look. They might want it drawn with a cartoon style or they might want it to be realistic. If the client wants a scene to look like it was shot with a special lens, such as wide angle, the artist can do that, too. And we can do quick pencil sketches to make sure that the camera angles are correct or that the people shown on the storyboard are the right ages."

For these advertising agency clients, the storyboard is more than a production planner, it's an all-important selling tool.

"The agencies use the storyboards to sell their commercials," Carter says, "to show how they would like to shoot it and where they would like to shoot it. They can have it set in Miami or in Norway. It's a visual tool to help their clients better understand what the finished product will look like."

Storyboards also prove invaluable when planning computer animations. Anyone who's worked with an animation package knows what a time-consuming process it can be. If you're creating an animation for someone else, you want to make sure they understand what you will create for them; otherwise it could mean hours or even days of extra work.

Say you tell your client Mr. Miller that the logo you're making for him will be a huge three-dimensional steel structure and that you're drawing the dot on the "i" in "Miller" to burst into flames, he may just stare at you, glassy-eyed. But whip out a storyboard illustrating the process of the logo "growing" on the page while light plays off the metal of the letters, he'll follow your every step. If the dot on the 'i" then burns like the sun, Mr. Miller will leave your session with stars in his eyes.

Storyboards for computer animation aren't necessarily drawn with classic artist tools such as pencils or brushes. Joseph Eagle, art director and animator at Traces, a computer animation firm in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania uses a unique approach to creating storyboards. His clients include the Philadelphia Phillies and the Unisys Corporation.

"We sit down and talk about what they want," Eagle says. "We may start out by doing some real quick and dirty thumbnail sketches just to make sure we're speaking the same language. Now, say a client comes in and she wants a 3-D Wavefront animation. Instead of spending time on the Wave-front, which is an expensive machine, what I'll do is get on the digital effects system, and with the 2-D system, I can create pictures with a number of different tools.

"I get a product and then we set up the 35mm camera and just shoot straight off the monitor. Then we get the pictures developed, cut them out, paste them on a board and write little descriptions beneath them of the activity that's going on in the pictures. The images look very high quality and in some cases, they look almost exactly how they are going to look in the finished piece, so they get a real good idea of what it's going to look like. We started doing that because we found that storyboards drawn with markers and colored pencils don't convey as much as video does."