Why Storyboard When I Already Have a Script?

You’ve probably come across this line at some point in your life, ‘humans are visual creatures’.

While many people in this vast and exciting world adopt different ways of learning and processing information, a study by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) states that 65% of the human population are visual learners. We believe this is part of what makes visual media so powerful in today’s world, and quite possibly, for as long as the human race exists on this planet.

As professionals in the visual media field, we live and breathe images. Better yet, moving images—it's our bread and butter. But what good are these images if they are not well-thought-out during the pre-production phase or worse, aimlessly executed when actual production starts?

In this article, we are diving deep into the (literal and figurative) art of storyboarding—what is its significance? How it is a critical process in the realm of video/film, and more importantly, what it can effectively achieve for different forms of videos that even writing alone cannot.

It’s time to think visually.

What is Storyboarding?

Ask anyone if they know what a ‘storyboard’ is and the most common answer you’d hear from a majority of them would be, ‘drawings’. Sure, they are pieces of hand-drawn or digital artwork that brings the written words of a script to life, but what separates them from your typical picture/comic book is that it gives practical direction— proposed camera movements, lighting, tone, action, and even editing notes that could aid a project from pre- to post-production.

Now that we’ve established that, pre-production is more than just putting pen to paper, location scouting, logistics, and budget planning. It's time to give some love to the storyboarding phase as it plays an equally crucial role in a project.

For a start, storyboarding allows the cast, crew, and clients to visualize the final product, not through pure imagination, but through their very eyes. It is essentially a visual blueprint that provides the same experience as watching an actual video.

What Good is Storyboarding to Your Video?

Whether it’s a corporate video, advertisement, or film, a storyboard keeps you grounded in reality; budget-wise and feasibility-wise. It attempts the ambitious and bold feats in a project before any money and sweat are poured into it for real, pre-empting any potential obstacles or creative constraints that you might face on set.

The video below shows a juxtaposition of a commercial in its video and storyboard form. Notice how the video and storyboard are not entirely spitting images of each other, but the original vision, sequence, and style are still very much faithful in the finished work.

Here’s another example.

Say, you want a nice tracking shot of a person walking along a pier. But not just any tracking shot, you want to give the audience a feeling that the person is being watched by someone (or ‘something’, maybe a sea monster) in the water. In order to achieve that, you’ll have to set the camera up over by the water, giving the audience an ominous POV of the said monster.

Let’s draw it out.

Take a look at the sample drawing above.

Is that what you’re hoping to achieve? How are you going to set up the camera over water? Does the budget allow that? Is that physically possible? Does the shot evoke an eerie feeling that was originally intended? These are the questions that begin to surface when you have a storyboard; it sharpens and refines your vision as you approach the actual shoot.

If that isn’t convincing enough, renowned filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese, and Christopher Nolan, to name a few, utilize storyboards religiously as part of their shooting plan to bring their unique visions— that have well-earned their place and adoration in cinematic history— to life.

A Storyboard for Everyone

As a full-fledged production house, the storyboarding phase is nothing new when it comes to planning and producing our projects. However, it would be interesting to know that the art of storyboarding does not purely exist as physical drawings. In fact, there are different visual forms of ‘storyboarding’ that serve the same purpose effectively.

Here’s how we employed different storyboarding styles in a few of our projects:

• NTUC Club x eXplorerKid — Baby & Junior Race 2019

A vibrant family event that aims to foster parent-child interaction through a fun-filled race that requires babies and toddlers to crawl or run towards a finish line.

The Baby & Junior Race 2019 was a live-action shoot that poses a new challenge for us right from the get-go, just how are we going to visually show a group of adorable babies and toddlers— who are known to be quite unpredictable?

To tackle that predicament, we conceptualized and storyboarded it.

Samples from our storyboard

Envisioning the video frame-by-frame proved to be extremely helpful as the crew went into the shoot, armed with the vision and direction of the task at hand, to film and wrap up the day’s work with ease.

• HDB Community Art Project

The HDB Community Week was an event that honours the efforts of heartland volunteers and the community initiatives that they’ve put together to promote good neighbourliness. One of such community initiatives was the Community Art Project, where thousands of Singaporeans showcased their artistic side and contributed to a massive art piece/installation curated by distinguished local artist, Sun Yu-li.

We were tasked to construct a highlights video of the event by piecing some existing footage that was given to us, while also weaving in bits of interview segments with the participants (that were to be shot by us). With so many visual materials at our disposal, we had to streamline the flow of the video to give it a coherent narrative.

To do that, we’ve decided to storyboard the video.

You must be wondering at this point, what if I’m not much of an artist to storyboard my ideas? That’s why we’re doing it a little differently this time.

Snippets of our digital storyboard for the HDB Community Art Project

Using thumbnails, screenshots, and photoshopped visuals, we put together a storyboard that is unlike those that we’ve discussed above, but nevertheless, allows the reader to visualize the flow and look of the full video, without any compromise. This is just another form of storyboarding that one could adopt to bring their ideas to life efficiently.

Check out the final video here and see how the storyboard reflects on it:

• 两人的幸福 Music Video

In this music video project that we’ve worked on recently, we experimented with a Tilta Float Handheld Gimbal Support System, an ergonomically designed and versatile equipment, to film all the action in one shot... Over multiple takes, of course.

Racing against a tight timeline, here’s how we storyboarded the MV, guerilla-style. Using the song’s lyrics sheet, we detailed and sketched the proposed angles and overall flow of the video over different verses of the song (as seen below).

Guerilla-style storyboarding

Watch how it all turns out here:

The Key to It All

Vision is probably the word that has been mentioned repeatedly in this article, but we are not expressing this term lightly. The first step to approaching an idea, whatever it may be, is to have a vision. It is the key to bringing anything to fruition.

Storyboarding is just a handy companion that shepherds your vision to the next level. 

Not any good at storyboarding or don’t know where to start?  

We’ve got you covered.