Storyboard Your Project

Turning your screenplay into a film can be overwhelming, that’s why many writers use storyboards. Storyboarding allows you to lay out the vision you have for your video. Before you begin storyboarding, there are certain tasks to perform and decisions to make. The first thing you need to do is evaluate your screenplay and picture it in terms of separate shots that can be translated into individual storyboard panels. Once you have an idea of what you want, you need to evaluate each shot. Where is the location? How many actors are needed in the shot? Etc. Once you’ve done that, you can create a shot list and decide which shots you want to storyboard. Some only choose to storyboard the shots that require a lot of work, others storyboard everything to get a better picture of how their film will turn out. You don’t need to buy any specific thing to create a storyboard, you can, but it’d be cheaper just to draw out some squares on a sheet of paper.

I see storyboarding as a great resource to use in the classroom. Even if your students aren’t creating a video, you could have them use storyboards to write and illustrate a book or even to organize their thoughts before they begin writing. Storyboards act as a graphic organizer in my classroom. Since most of my students are very visual, it helps them to draw out their thinking before they begin writing.

Check out this example storyboard!