Storyboard template

What this is about

Nobody on set has time to admire drawings; they have time to read them. A useful board is a chain of decisions — framing, movement, continuity — drawn just well enough that a stranger understands the film without a narrator standing next to it. The panel proportions carry information too: boarding a vertical film in horizontal frames plans a film that will never exist. And because every panel promises a setup, the board doubles as an early honesty check on the budget.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Panels drawn in the delivery aspect ratio — 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1 — because composition decisions made in the wrong frame do not transfer
• A caption line under each panel carrying scene, shot size and one sentence of action or dialogue, readable without the drawing
• Arrows that distinguish subject movement inside the frame from camera movement across it, since confusing the two rebuilds the setup on set
• Sequence numbering that matches the shot list IDs, so board, list and schedule stay one system instead of three opinions

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Thumbnail the whole film first in tiny frames to find the rhythm, before investing effort in any single panel.
2. Board the key moment of each shot rather than every second of it; a shot earns extra panels only when something changes inside it.
3. Draw movement with arrows and, where a move is complex, add a start frame and an end frame instead of a paragraph.
4. Annotate each panel with size, lens feel and sound or dialogue cues, keeping the wording identical to the shot list.
5. Check the board against the shot list for orphans in both directions — boarded shots nobody listed, listed shots nobody boarded.
6. Prepare the client version with clean captions, because a board that needs you in the room to explain it fails its main job.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Boarding a 9:16 deliverable in 16:9 panels and discovering the real framing on the shoot day
• Polishing drawings instead of decisions — a beautiful board can still describe an unshootable film
• Boarding every single frame so tightly that the set loses the freedom to react to what is actually there

With TillyGen

TillyGen generates storyboard frames per shot straight from the plan, in the right aspect ratio, and keeps them tied to the shot list — change the shot and the panel follows.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.