Why the Storyboard is Crucial to Your Project

A storyboard, folks, is where it begins. A storyboard is a visual representation of the story. It comes in the form of a series of sketches or images (that just might look a lot like manga!). This sequence of sketches or images, in turn, comes from the script, which comes from the writers. The storyboard shows things such as what and how many characters will be in a certain scene, what the environment will look like, how the plot progresses, so on and so forth.

The storyboard is important for both the client and the production team. For the client, they will actually get to “see” what the production team has in mind for the script or story. For the production team, making the storyboard helps them to calculate precisely how many animated scenes are needed in the video (or short film, or film), and thus to work out the length of the video, how many artists would be needed in the production team, and how long it would take to create it.

A big production often involves hundreds of people working together over a short period of time. A filming, for example, is usually constrained to 6 months at most. A short film or a commercial might take a couple months to make, while a feature film might take anywhere from two to five years. During this period of time, it’s incredibly important to be able to minimize mistakes and keep everything on schedule. As such the storyboard is incredibly useful in identifying early potholes, allowing the designers to steer clear of potential mistakes during the production time.

This in turn of course saves money (the client’s budget), and also serves to keep the production within the given deadline. Often a production gets bloated and takes much more time and resources than necessary because the storyboard in the beginning was not solid.

Of course, for a smaller scale production, there might be a bit more leniency and flexibility, but for a large scale production, all studios would want to avoid unnecessary missteps because the consequences can be dire in terms of wasted time and money. In that way, a detailed storyboard at the beginning is crucial to the success of the project and will save you much headache down the road!

In the next article, we’ll go through the various steps of actually making a storyboard.