From the course: Essentials of Storyboarding

Benefits to production

From the course: Essentials of Storyboarding

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Benefits to production

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- Storyboards provide much more to production than just pretty pictures of the director's vision. They also help with budgeting and scheduling. The visual representation of each visual effects shot in live-action productions, or sequence of stunts, allows the crew heads in production to properly plan, schedule and budget for potentially complicated and expensive production elements. For animation, it also allows them to break it down between A, B and C level of complicated scenes, so they can also plan who does what and how long it will take. So, like drawing blueprints for a house, a storyboard details elements of the shots that may not be clear in the script alone. Eliminating any one misconception can potentially save a production much more than the time and money than the entire cost of a story artist Plus storyboards help a production schedule and budget. So for instance, on the movie McHale's Navy, which I story boarded a long time ago, we had a sequence that was described in one eighth of a page, as you can see in this representation of a script here. Now, we break script pages into eighth of a page to help determine how much work can be done in one day. So it's generally an eighth of a page is two or three lines, that's it. So that one eighth of a page said that the villain blew up our heroes hut. Let's go to an example here. Our hero chased the villain and blew up the villain's boat. So even though the script description was really brief, the director had a huge vision in his head of explosions and missiles and boat chases and more. And it took over a hundred drawings to represent and a week to shoot in Acapulco. Now, without the storyboards, there was no way they could have planned the depth of that sequence. When the practical effects team saw the boards, they determined how many boats they needed, how many explosions, hits, water cannons and more. Visual effects made a list of all the effects that they could enhance. Stunts determined how many stuntmen and what type of stunt equipment they needed. The art department saw what they had to build. Props realized that they needed more of the different specialty items. And the director of photography, or the DP, made a list of the camera gear and lenses and everything that he needed for the sequence. Transportation determined how many boats and trucks and trailers they needed for support. The first assistant director, or the first AD, spoke to all the crew heads to determine how much time they needed. From all that info, production was then able to schedule the shoot and determine the budget. Plus the director and producer were able to review the sequence, which is especially easy these days with animatics and make sure that the story worked properly. So, storyboards enhance storytelling and make accurate planning for productions possible.

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