The Power of a Storyboard

A storyboard is simply the plan or outline for a news story, film, or animation. once the concept for a story or script is thought of the next step is to create a storyboard. A visual means of telling your story frame by frame or panel by panel, comic book style.

an effective storyboard should include who is in the frame and their movement, the dialogue in the scene, the time that each frame is occuring, and what kind of shot you would like this to be in terms of your camera placement. Close up? Medium range? Long range? Zoom? Is the camera moving? Storyboards should be used in the planning stage, it needs to be used as a reference tool to come back to regardless if you stick to it completely or not. It is simply a way to organize all of the clutter in your brain while planning a story, to help you get all of your ideas out in the open.

Why use a storyboard? Because they make things so much easier in the future! it may mean taking a little bit more planning time, before you can actually get out there and start your story. But it is definitely worth it in the long run! organization is a quality of every good journalist, even if they don't appear to be organized, every journalist has some planning process before they begin a news story. storyboarding is just a simple way of doing this.