How to Make a Storyboard (Without Drawing)

Whether you’re shooting a feature, a commercial or a YouTube video, to get started you need to know what to shoot.

This can be a real hurdle for filmmakers of any skill level, as visualising a script or concept is not a simple task given the wealth of angles, camera moves and filmmaking options we have at our disposal. But there’s a sure-fire way to overcome this, through storyboarding.

Storyboards let us previsualise every shot in a scene, providing us with a clear, visual, understanding of what we will execute on the shooting day. And, more importantly, they act as a perfect collaboration tool allowing for easy communication between team members.

But there’s a catch. To make a storyboard, you need to draw. And, sadly, drawing isn’t a skill we all have.

Fortunately, there’s another way to make the perfect storyboard.

Storyboarding with Images

As we live in the age of digitally reproducible images, we can use that to our advantage. Creating storyboards by compiling images to reach the same goal as a traditional storyboard.

FilmQi’s storyboard feature makes this process a breeze. Providing a simple interface to create an annotates storyboard with found images or ones you have taken yourself.

This process helps to liberate those of us who lack drawing skills, letting us reap all the benefits of a functional storyboard without requiring us to take a detour to art school.

Picking the Right Images

An image-based storyboard sounds simple. Just hop onto google and type in the shot you’re looking for then copy and paste, right? Not exactly. Before you launch into compiling a bunch of disparate images there are a few things worth considering to ensure that your storyboard communicates exactly what you want it to.

Include Key Information

First and foremost, you want to ensure that every image in your storyboard succinctly conveys the shot you want to achieve on the day.

Let’s say your storyboarding an establishing shot of a house at night, backlit by the moon. Each of those four key pieces of information need to come across in the image you use. But, as we’ll see later, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to find an image which is exactly the same as the one you will shoot—as, if your ideas are fresh enough, that can be impossible!

Add Movement

Movement is a key part of cinematic vocabulary. However still images, of course, struggle to clearly capture motion. This is why storyboards will often feature arrows, inner frames or text which indicate camera movements.

Adding such adornments to your image-based storyboard is key to communicating the movement you want.

Whether you use the standard arrow-based convention, text or inner frames is up to you. But whichever option you choose, be sure to keep it consistent, so that your storyboard is clear and easy to read.

Supplement your Images

Just like we added information to explain movement, there is a good chance that the image you have chosen hasn’t captured exactly what you are looking for.

Returning to our example from earlier, perhaps the only image of an establishing shot of a house you could find was in daylight, and it wasn’t backlit. Instead of settling for a shot which doesn’t convey the key information you are looking for, you can alter that shot to make it work. Either doing so through editing the photo or by simply describing the changes in the shot’s caption.

Retain Style

Hand drawn storyboards can be incredibly stylish, especially when a commissioned artist gets involved. In such a case, the storyboard can visualise the style of the film—both cinematically and in terms of production design. Your image-based storyboard can do the same.

To do this, it’s key to ensure the details of images a coherent with your project’s aesthetic. Whether that be in colour palette or production design. And, again, you can achieve this by editing the images you find online.

Avoid Iconic Shots

Finally, it can be tempting to choose some of your favourite shots in film history to include, but we encourage you to keep those off your storyboard. This is because such images can often end up being less useful tools of communication given their familiarity.

So instead of grabbing stills from The Dark Knight or 2001, try to get some more generic stills to better convey the information and style of your project.

How to Visualise Shots

While we’ve gone over how to use images in your storyboard, we’re yet to address the elephant in the room: how do you actually come up with what shots to include in a sequence?

There’s no hard-and-fast rule for how you should shoot a film, giving you total freedom to envision a scene in whichever way you think will create the audience response you are looking for. So, we would encourage you to read over the script a few times and allow your mind to conjure up the images.

But if you are struggling to get images into your mind, there are a load of conventions you can fall back on. For example, let’s consider a scene where two women are talking on a park bench.

Conventionally speaking, you would start with an establishing shot showing the characters within the location. Then you might cut to an over-shoulder of one woman, supplemented by a reverse-angle over the shoulder of the other woman. Then as one woman presents an object, you would cut to an insert of said object. Finishing the scene on a two-shot.

There are tonnes of ways you can shoot a scene like this, but most will use the same bank of shot types, which consists of:

·       Establishing shots.

·       Long shots.

·       Medium shots.

·       Close-ups.

·       Over shoulder shots.

·       Inserts.

And if you’re still in doubt, rewatch some of your favourite movies paying close attention to the shots they use and in which order.

Then, once you have started visualising your scene, you’re ready to create your storyboard.

Shooting for the Storyboard

While your search for storyboard images will likely start online, there is another option: shoot them yourself.

Grabbing your camera and a few stand-ins, this can be one of the most effective ways to create the ideal storyboard for your project, as it lets you control every detail. Allowing you to achieve a tailor-made storyboard which conveys all the key information with relative ease.

Get Storyboarding

As we’ve explored, storyboarding is a hugely important part of pre-production. But, contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be skilled with a pen to make a great storyboard.

Using, or creating, strong images that convey the key information of each shot in your project is possible with as little as the internet. And with FilmQi, that process becomes even more streamlined when you factor in their massive database of pictures selected for exactly this purpose. Meaning that with FilmQi, your storyboard is only ever a few clicks away—and even better, you can get started today without spending a penny, with the free plan.