Why Are Storyboards Important?
January 26, 2012
By Luke Witcomb | No Comments
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If you’ve ever watched the ‘Special Features’ disc accompanying any big feature film you’ll be familiar with seeing the director animatedly guiding the production team through beautifully illustrated storyboards of his or her vision of all the sequences in the movie; and as the simplest way of all to draft a production concept they’re an equally important tool in shorter productions like television commercials. Storyboards aren’t just pretty pictures to flatter a director’s ego, they’re a very useful tool to kick off a production and to keep it running smoothly.
In almost all instances (all but the most basic of ads) our television commercials begin as a storyboard accompanied by a rough script. Storyboards are especially useful when we are producing for clients further afield. On several occasions we’ve emailed storyboards as PDF files to the USA in the morning (UK time) ready to discuss in an afternoon teleconference with the client. Many of the potential commercials pitched by agencies never actually get into production – the storyboards are just visualisations of the possible creative treatments, and more often than not only one of them will make it to fruition. The rest are filed away as inspiration for another day. The storyboard is a vital ingredient in making sure that everyone around the table, or on the other side of the Atlantic, has a similar interpretation of what the final commercial needs to look like. Storyboards are especially important for clients as, unlike the agency, they won’t have spent days putting fully-fledged ideas together – the client often can’t quiet visualise what the creatives have dreamt up to meet the brief. The storyboard makes the proposed commercial more ‘real’ and becomes something that can bring all parties (agency, client, production company) into the loop – quite literally everyone is ‘on the same page’.
Sometimes a static A3 paper storyboard just doesn’t quite convey the complexities of motion in the shots or the flow of the edits in a proposed commercial. So, to give a better idea to the client of what’s in our heads we’ll sometimes take a little longer to produce an ‘animatic’ – basically a roughly animated storyboard comprising of still images and illustrations brought to life with the anticipated camera movements, approximate edit points and a guide voiceover. The creation of an animatic is of most use on commercials where timings are going to be critical or to answer the simple question of whether the proposed concept can comfortably fit into the thirty or forty seconds allocated to it! For the most complex of commercials we may even do a ‘test shoot’ – these often make for amusing viewing as they usually feature people from the office acting out the commercial with props cut out of cardboard boxes and so forth, but they commonly provide answers to questions that would have caused hassle (or unexpected expense) later on in production. A test shoot also provides post-production with an opportunity to test any proposed effects or compositing work and any recommendations from this can then be catered for during the ‘proper’ shoot… practise is the best method of making sure things go right first time!
So, even in a workflow where all of the day’s footage ends up on a memory card the size of a postage stamp the whole process still often starts with the humble old paper storyboard.