The Art of Storyboards

So you want to make a video but don't know where to start or better yet, you don't know what to make a video of? It's ok, most people have the common case of the "I Don't Know What to Do" syndrome. Relax! If you want to make a really good quality, professional looking video, it's always best to start at the beginning by jotting down some notes.

If this is for a school or company project, I highly suggest you really take the time to consider your production options before moving onto any kind of casting, shooting, etc. If you're set out to make a homemade video of your Cousin Skippy doing the world's fastest Frisbee toss while juggling your collection of shoes, then you probably won't be putting much thought into making a good quality video. When I say good quality or professional video, I'm talking about something that will officially represent you, your company, your idea, etc. In other words put as much effort into the production of your videos as if it where up for an Oscar nomination!

So first off, think to yourself what do I want to create? Music Video, Commercial, Documentary, Commentary, etc. Put yourself into a category of what TYPE of video you want to create and then you can start selecting the topics, songs, products, etc. While I was studying Broadcasting in college, I had the opportunity to create two music videos. The first one I created was a video featuring some of my closest college friends has we lip-synced to "I'll Remember You" by The Rembrandts (aka the theme from "Friends"). The concept of the video was pretty simple, each of us had specific lyrics to follow throughout the song as we acted different scenes that correspond to the message of the song. Now please keep in mind, this was a class assignment so there were certain steps that had to be followed throughout all aspects of production, which I'll get to in a minute. The second video I made was a custom song for my college written and sung by DJ $crilla (and yes there is a $ instead of S). The song was titled "Ashland University 2008" and highlighted some cool things about the school and also focused on our Greek Life. When I made the music video for this song, the production schedule was a little interesting because of different events that were going on at the time of production.

Regardless, something that helped my with both music video shoots, and in fact all of my video projects, was a simple tool called Story boarding. For those who are not familiar with this concept, I can assure you it is for your benefit and easy to do. Basically, story boarding is a set of drawings that illustrates your ideas for your video. Don't worry, although you have to be the one to draw them that doesn't mean you have to have draw well. All you're doing is sketching out ideas for your video shoot in order to keep track of scenes, props, cast, and other important factors. To illustrate my point, here are a few pages of my storyboard for the "I'll Remember You" music video:

This is a just sample of the storyboard I put together for this video shoot. All together it came to about 21 pages. The final product didn't turn out exactly how I had planned for it, but the project got done  and turned out really well. Having that storyboard to help guide the cast and visualize the ideas I wanted to portray really brought the video together. Sure stuff happened, bad weather, camera problems, etc.- storyboards can't fix that, but it helps organize your thoughts and plans. If you have to re-route your concepts from what you had originally planned, that's fine.

Before you begin any kind of shooting or pre-production work, I strongly recommend you take the time to create a storyboard illustrating your visual concept of how you want the video to be portrayed. If you have cast or other crew members, allow them to look over your storyboard and get their input as well. If you need scripts and/or song lyrics for the video, provide them a copy of the materials so they can follow along with the lines and your pictures. Story boarding is easy, efficient, and a great organizing tool to help you keep tracking with your production. If you're someone who is also looking to do any kind of graphics or animation work in your videos, storyboards allow you the ability to plan those ideas out as well. Below is a video I found on YouTube where animators from The Walt Disney Studios discussing how storyboards work and how they can be useful for you upcoming video projects.

Enjoy the video and Happy Storyboarding!!!