Disney Studios first used the term “storyboard” sometime after 1928, when its typical practice was to present basic action and gags on drawn panels, usually three to six sketches per vertical page.
[6] Another innovation, developed by Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic, was shooting video in a miniature set using toy figures attached to rods, hand-manipulated to previsualize the speeder bike forest chase in Return of the Jedi.
[8] Once production began, the video from the 35-mm cameras shooting the live performance movie gradually replaced the storyboarded stills to give Coppola a more complete vision of the film's progress.
[9] Video feeds from the five stages at the Hollywood General Studios were fed into the trailer, which also had an off-line editing system, switcher, disk-based still store, and Ultimatte keyers.
[8] 3D computer graphics were relatively rare until 1993, when Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park using revolutionary and Oscar-winning visual effects work by Industrial Light and Magic, one of the only companies that could use digital technology to create imagery.
In Paramount Pictures' Mission: Impossible, visual effects supervisor (and Photoshop creator) John Knoll asked artist David Dozoretz to create one of the first-ever previsualizations for an entire sequence of shots rather than just one scene.
Visual effects companies that specialize in large project previsualization often use common software packages, like Newtek's Lightwave 3D, Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, and Softimage XSI.
Others use 3D previsualization programs like FrameForge 3D Studio, which won a Technical Achievement Emmy with Avid’s Motion Builder for representing an improvement on existing methods [that] are so innovative in nature that they materially have affected the transmission, recording, or reception of television.
Weinman created primitive 3D motion of the Starship Enterprise using Swivel 3D software designing shots based on feedback from producer Ralph Winter and director William Shatner.
While the implementation of this idea yielded limited results for The Abyss, the effort led Smith to create Virtus Walkthrough, an architectural previsualization software program, in 1990.
While teaching previsualization at the American Film Institute in 1993, Katz suggested to producer Ralph Singleton that a fully animated digital animatic of a seven-minute sequence for the Harrison Ford action movie Clear and Present Danger would solve a variety of production problems encountered when the location in Mexico became unavailable.
This was the first fully produced use of computer previsualization that was created for a director outside of a visual effects department and solely for the use of determining the dramatic impact and shot flow of a scene.
Green had been part of the Image Engineering department at Ride Film, Douglas Trumball's VFX company in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where he was in charge of using CAD systems to create miniature physical models (rapid prototyping).
In 1994, David Dozoretz, working with Photoshop co-creator John Knoll, created digital animatics for the final chase scene for Mission: Impossible (1996).
Borrowing technology developed by the video game industry, today's previsualization software give filmmakers the ability to compose electronic 2D storyboards on their own personal computer and also create 3D animated sequences that can predict with remarkable accuracy what will appear on the screen.
Nowadays many filmmakers are looking to quick, yet optically-accurate 3D software to help with the task of previsualization in order to lower budget and time constraints, as well as give them greater control over the creative process by allowing them to generate the previs themselves.
Some popular tools for directors, cinematographers and VFX Supervisors is FrameForge 3D Studio,[19] ShotPro (for iPad and iPhone),[20][21] Shot Designer,[22] Toonboom Storyboard Pro, Moviestorm and iClone,[23] amongst others.