How to Make a Storyboard: A Step by Step Guide for Filmmakers

If you are learning how to make a storyboard, the first thing to know is that nobody cares whether you can draw. A storyboard is a plan, not a portfolio. Its job is to show what the camera sees, shot by shot, so everyone who reads it understands the scene the same way before a single minute of shoot time gets spent. Stick figures with arrows have planned more good scenes than polished paintings ever will.

This guide covers what a storyboard does, where the form came from, and a practical step by step method for making one from your script, whether you are a writer visualizing your own pages, a first time director prepping a short, or a crew of three trying to shoot a weekend film without chaos.

What a storyboard is for

A storyboard is a sequence of simple images that previsualizes a film before it is shot. In film, it is sometimes called a shooting board: a series of frames drawing the sequence of events, a bit like a comic book version of the scene. The Wikipedia entry on storyboards sums up the practical value well: boards help directors and cinematographers visualize scenes and find potential problems before they occur, and they can help estimate cost and save time.

That last part matters more on a small production than a big one. Every shot you cut on paper is a setup you do not have to light, a location angle you do not have to dress, an hour you do not have to pay anyone for.

Boards also earn their keep during the shoot itself. Scenes are rarely filmed in script order, and individual shots within a scene often get filmed out of order and on different days. A director can glance at the board on set to remember how those shots were meant to cut together, which is a lot faster than rereading the script while the crew waits.

And they help in the edit. Wikipedia notes a storyboard can also be useful when the editor is assembling the first rough cut.

Where storyboards came from

The modern form came out of animation. Storyboarding as we know it was developed at Walt Disney Productions during the early 1930s, according to Wikipedia's history of the form, which cites several books on Disney. Diane Disney Miller's biography of her father, The Story of Walt Disney (1956), says the first complete storyboards were made for the Disney short Three Little Pigs (1933).

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Who invented it is genuinely disputed. Christopher Finch's The Art of Walt Disney says Disney credited animator Webb Smith with the idea of drawing scenes on separate sheets and pinning them to a bulletin board in sequence. Pete Docter and Don Peri's Directing at Disney (2024) gives a different account, in which Dick Huemer credited Ted Sears. The one thing nobody disputes is how fast it spread: by 1937 or 1938, all American animation studios were using storyboards.

Live action followed. Gone with the Wind (1939) was one of the first live action films to be completely storyboarded. Producer David O. Selznick hired William Cameron Menzies to design every shot of the film. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which holds Selznick's papers, still has a Menzies storyboard for the Burning of Atlanta scene, and the DGA Quarterly has published those boards as an example of the careful planning needed to shoot that scene on the MGM lot.

Selznick's memos show how new the role was. In one, quoted by the Ransom Center, he wrote: "Menzies’ task is a monumental one and I am anxious that he receive fair credit." The on screen credit became: "This Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies." The Ransom Center's piece on biographer James Curtis describes Menzies as the man who introduced the concept of production design to American films. Storyboarding then became popular in live action during the early 1940s.

The tradition is very much alive. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), directed by George Miller, who wrote the screenplay with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris, is famous for its boards; No Film School reports that Miller and McCarthy drew approximately 3,500 storyboards over two years, covering the office walls. That fame produced a myth that the film had no script. Miller rejected it, as quoted by CinemaBlend: "Of course there was a script! How else could we have presented the project to a studio, cast and crew to elicit their interest?"

That is the right relationship to keep in mind. The script tells the story. The storyboard shows how the camera will tell it.

How to make a storyboard, step one: break the scene into shots

Do not start drawing. Start with the script and a pencil.

1. Read the scene for story. What happens, what changes, whose scene is it? Which moment matters most? That moment probably earns the closest shot.
2. Mark the beats. Draw a line in the margin every time something shifts: a new piece of information, a decision, a reveal, a power change.
3. List the shots. For each beat, write what the audience needs to see to follow it. "Wide of the diner, Ana enters." "Close on the envelope." "Ana's face as she reads it." Keep it to one line per shot.
4. Number everything. Scene number plus a letter or number per shot (12A, 12B, 12C). These numbers will follow the shot onto the shot list, the call sheet and the slate.
5. Cut. Look at the list and ask which shots are carrying weight and which are just coverage out of habit. On a short shoot, every shot you remove buys time for the ones that matter.

Here is what that looks like on a tiny scene. Say your script reads: Ana walks into an empty diner, the waiter slides an envelope across the counter without a word, she opens it, reads, and leaves her coffee untouched. A first pass shot list might be:

• 12A, wide: the diner from the back booth, Ana entering through the front door. Tells us where we are and that she is alone.
• 12B, medium: the waiter at the counter, watching her come in. Introduces him and his silence.
• 12C, close up: the envelope sliding across the counter. The object the scene is about.
• 12D, medium close up: Ana, looking at the envelope, not touching it yet. Her decision.
• 12E, insert: the letter in her hands. We do not need to read it; we need to see that she does.
• 12F, close up: Ana's face as she reads. The turn of the scene.
• 12G, wide: Ana leaving, the full coffee cup in the foreground. The aftermath, told with a prop.

Seven shots for half a page. Now apply step five. Do you need 12B? If the waiter matters later, yes. If he is just a hand, cut it and let 12C introduce him by his hand alone. Could 12E and 12F be one shot, a slow push from the letter up to her face? Maybe, if you have a dolly and the time to rehearse it. If you do not, two simple shots are safer than one ambitious one. This is the real work of storyboarding: making those trade offs on paper, where they are free.

You also do not have to board everything. On a tight schedule, many small productions board only the scenes where the camera has to do something specific: action, a reveal, a stunt, an effect, any moment where the cut has to land exactly. A two person dialogue in one room can often live on a shot list and an overhead map alone. Board the scenes where confusion would cost you the most.

This list is the skeleton of your board. Many directors make a rough version of it before drawing a thing, because it is faster to argue with a list than with forty drawings.

Pick your frame shape and shot sizes

Before you draw panel one, decide the shape of the frame. Storyboard frames are traditionally drawn on rectangles with the same aspect ratio as the format the film will be shot in. That matters: a composition that works in a tall rectangle can fall apart in a wide one.

Common choices, per Wikipedia's aspect ratio entry: 1.85

Next, a shared vocabulary for how much of the subject each frame shows. Wikipedia's shot sizes by field size give a workable list:

• Long or wide shot: the environment around the subjects, often used as an establishing shot.
• Full shot: the whole subject just fits in the frame.
• Medium long shot: the frame ends near the knees.
• Medium shot: the frame stops just above or below the waist.
• Medium close up: more of the shoulders visible than in a close up.
• Close up: the shoulder line is visible.
• Extreme close up: the frame stops at the chin and forehead.

Label each panel with its size (WS, MS, MCU, CU) even if your drawing makes it obvious. The label is what the camera team will read at 6 a.m.

A printable storyboard template saves you ruling boxes by hand: it comes as a PDF or Word file, or you can build your own in any aspect ratio, and it includes three example boards drawn frame by frame with notes.

Draw it badly, on purpose

Now draw. Fast and rough is the goal. A few rules make rough drawings readable:

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• Draw the frame edge first. Everything inside it is what the camera sees. Everything outside does not exist.
• Use stick figures with a direction. A circle for a head, a line for the nose so you can see which way the person faces. Facing direction is information.
• Show size by scale. A close up is a big head filling the box. A wide shot is a tiny figure in a big space. You do not need detail to show this.
• Mark the horizon. One line tells the reader where the camera height is: a low horizon reads as a low angle, a high one as looking down.
• One idea per panel. If a panel needs two events, it is probably two shots.
• Leave room for words. Under or beside each frame, write the action and any dialogue that plays over it.

Wikipedia makes a useful point about style: for fast action, monochrome line art can be enough, while slower dramatic work that leans on lighting may need colour, impressionist style art to communicate mood. For most indie shoots, line art plus a note like "warm practical light, rest in shadow" does the job.

Arrows, notes and the 180 degree line

A drawing is a frozen moment; a shot moves. Storyboards often carry arrows or instructions that indicate movement, and you need two kinds:

• Subject movement: an arrow inside the frame showing where a character or object goes.
• Camera movement: an arrow on or around the frame edge, labelled (PAN L, TILT UP, PUSH IN, DOLLY R, HANDHELD).

Then add the notes that pictures cannot carry: lens if it matters, sound cues, a key prop, a lighting change, the line of dialogue the shot starts or ends on.

The biggest thing a board protects you from is the 180 degree rule. The rule says the camera stays on one side of an imaginary axis between two characters, so the first character is always frame right of the second. Crossing over is called "crossing the line", and on a cut it reverses the characters left to right and can disorient the viewer.

It applies to movement too. If a character walks leftward and is picked up by another camera, they should exit the first shot frame left and enter the next frame right. Draw a small overhead map of the room with the line marked and your camera positions numbered, and check every panel against it. It is far easier to catch a crossed line on paper than in the edit.

How to make a storyboard when you cannot draw

If stick figures still feel like a barrier, skip drawing entirely.

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Photo boards. Take your phone to the location (or your living room), stand in friends as the characters, and shoot each frame from the actual camera position. Wikipedia describes a similar approach in advertising, the photomatic, where a series of still photos is cut together to show how a piece could be shot and edited.

Animatics. Once you have frames, you can time them. In animation, an animatic is a sequence of storyboard images played in sync with rough dialogue or soundtrack, to see how a scene feels with timing before committing to it. Even a simple slideshow of your panels with a scratch read of the dialogue will tell you whether a scene drags.

A digital tool. A free storyboard creator lets you draw or drop an image into each frame, set the shot size, angle and camera move, add action and dialogue, reorder frames and save the board as a PDF. Reordering matters more than it sounds: Wikipedia notes that sorting storyboards out of chronological order is often how flashbacks and suspense get built.

If you want to learn from the people who do it full time, Pixar and Khan Academy's free Pixar in a Box course includes an Art of Storytelling series whose sixth lesson is on storyboarding, according to No Film School.

From storyboard to shot list to set

A board shows what each shot looks like. A shot list turns that into a schedule. Once your panels are settled, copy every numbered shot into a list with its size, angle, movement and lens, plus an estimated time, then group the list by camera setup rather than by story order, because that is how you will actually shoot it. A shot list template with those columns lets you start blank or from your script and download a CSV or print it.

A few habits make the handoff smooth:

1. Same numbers everywhere. Shot 12C on the board is 12C on the list and on the slate.
2. Mark must haves. Star the shots the scene cannot work without, so when the day runs long you know what to drop.
3. Print the board for set. Remember the out of order problem: the board is how you keep the cut in your head while shooting shot 12F before 12A.
4. Update it. If you change a shot on the day, scribble it on the board so the editor knows what you meant.

That is how to make a storyboard that actually gets used: break the scene into shots, match the frame, draw fast, mark movement and the line, then hand it off to a shot list. Whether you sketch on paper, shoot photos or build frames in the storyboard creator, the board's value is the thinking it forces before the camera rolls. Disney's story artists in the 1930s and Menzies on Gone with the Wind were solving the same problem you are: making sure everyone sees the same film before anyone pays to shoot it.