Storyboard

Many large budget silent films were storyboarded, but most of this material has been lost during the reduction of the studio archives during the 1970s and 1980s.

[3] According to John Canemaker, in Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards (1999, Hyperion Press), the first storyboards at Disney evolved from comic book-like "story sketches" created in the 1920s to illustrate concepts for animated cartoon short subjects such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie, and within a few years the idea spread to other studios.

According to Christopher Finch in The Art of Walt Disney (Finch, 1995),[4] Disney credited animator Webb Smith with creating the idea of drawing scenes on separate sheets of paper and pinning them up on a bulletin board to tell a story in sequence, thus creating the first storyboard.

It helps film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur.

In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens.

In the storyboarding process, most technical details involved in crafting a film or interactive media project can be efficiently described either in a picture or in additional text.

In the latter scenario, directors can use storyboards on set to quickly refresh their memory as to the desired effect when those shots are later edited together in the correct order.

Directors and playwrights frequently[citation needed] use storyboards as special tools to understand the layout of the scene.

The German director and dramatist Bertolt Brecht developed detailed storyboards as part of his dramaturgical method of "fabels.

"[citation needed] In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how a scene will look and feel with motion and timing.

This allows the animators and directors to work out any screenplay, camera positioning, shot list, and timing issues that may exist with the current storyboard.

A few minutes of screen time in traditional animation usually equates to months of work for a team of traditional animators, who must painstakingly draw and paint countless frames, meaning that all that labor (and salaries already paid) will have to be written off if the finished scene simply does not work in the film's final cut.

Often storyboards are animated with simple zooms and pans to simulate camera movement (using non-linear editing software).

These animations can be combined with available animatics, sound effects, and dialog to create a presentation of how a film could be shot and cut together.

John Stanley and Carl Barks (when he was writing stories for the Junior Woodchuck title) are known to have used this style of scripting.

[12][13] In Japanese comics, the word "name" (ネーム, nēmu, pronounced [neːmɯ]) is used for rough manga storyboards.

Storyboards can also be used to visually understand the consumer experience by mapping out the customer's journey brands can better identify potential pain points and anticipate their emerging needs.

[15] Some consulting firms teach the technique to their staff to use during the development of client presentations, frequently employing the "brown paper technique" of taping presentation slides (in sequential versions as changes are made) to a large piece of kraft paper which can be rolled up for easy transport.

Usually, a project needs to be seen by a panel of judges and nowadays it's possible to create virtual models of proposed new buildings, using advanced computer software to simulate lights, settings, and materials.

Clearly, this type of work takes time – and so the first stage is a draft in the form of a storyboard, to define the various sequences that will subsequently be computer-animated.

One advantage of using storyboards is that it allows (in film and business) the user to experiment with changes in the storyline to evoke stronger reaction or interest.

Flashbacks, for instance, are often the result of sorting storyboards out of chronological order to help build suspense and interest.

Some software applications even supply a stable of storyboard-specific images making it possible to quickly create shots that express the director's intent for the story.

In classic motion pictures such as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the director created storyboards that were initially thought by cinematographers to be impossible to film.