What is Storyboarding?

A Storyboard is a sequence of illustrations representing the shots for a scene, they include a detailed drawing of what the shot would look like, along with summarised notes on the shot's components to its side - e.g. descriptions of location, action, shot movement, sound, lighting, transition and timing.

They're essentially used as a tool for the director to effectively communicate their vision from their mind onto paper, allowing for easier communication and group work between them and other production crew.

Overall, they work as a representation for the whole scene's visual order and lets you make sure that the shots would flow smoothly between each other; once every shot is stacked together, it is much easier to spot certain shots that may not work as intended or look a bit out of place.

They also offer a range of other benefits; 

Storyboarding significantly decreases production costs as decision time on set is reduced since everyone can simply make choices based off of the storyboard, saving everything from time and studio rent costs as everything is planned beforehand.

Since they are also simply drawn from scratch, they allow plenty of opportunities for experimenting with different angles, composition, lighting etc... to think creatively outside of the box and see what looks best, rather than again experimenting on set with the camera itself and taking up studio time.

They benefit both the pre and post production process;

They are obviously beneficial to the director as it can sometimes be difficult and frustrating to communicate the image you see in your mind to someone else, so having the freedom to reflect every detail through art is very useful for the other production members to work off of.

However, they also immensely facilitate the editing process - once production is wrapped and they can get to working, editors are faced with hours upon hours of raw footage to sort through and meticulously cut to create the final product, so working from the script along with this detailed visual plan of the scene's progression is very helpful for organisation, saving time and effort.. (and maintaining sanity).

What to consider when Storyboarding

Some useful things to keep in mind when drawing out a Storyboard is different camera compositions and framing; make use of rule of thirds, should the shot be symmetrical or asymmetrical? What's in the fore/background? What's in focus? etc...

Overall, a good tip is so simply let yourself experiment; when drawing (or instructing an artist to do so), you have full creative freedom to construct any possible visual combination you could think of - make use of it.

Here are some examples of (very rough) Storyboards that I drew for a past project.