“Storyboard” is a general term that applies to a lot of different formats and applications. Storyboarding could, generally mean any sketched-out framework for explaining a concept or idea (a complex computer game or website for example), or intricately rendered sketches that show the frames of an advertising campaign or TV commercial. But what we’re talking about here is capturing an intermediate stage between what is in a film director’s head and what will eventually appear on the big screen...

Preparation is vital in completing a storyboard series in a sane manner. It’s easy enough to just start sketching from a blank page, but unless you’ve gone through the scene line-by-line (on your own, as well as along with the director), gathered your reference material, know your sets and locations, I guarantee — from experience — that you’re gonna get stuck...

Now that we’ve secured our virtual locations and have designed the characters that will appear in the sequence, it’s time to start sketching out the shots. If you’ll remember, from the previous tutorials, this will be done with the film’s director, as the two of you sit down and they go through what they want for the scene...

Now, we’ll look at creating tension in the scene, which shouldn’t be too much trouble here, in our example, because we have zombies behind them and zombies below them, but we’ll do our best to ratchet things up a bit and try to actually refine and improve upon what’s in the script...

In the last tutorial, we touched briefly on indicating a moving camera with static frames. We’ll expand on that some more now, as we enter the guts of our action sequence. Your goal, with any set of storyboards, but especially with action-oriented ones, is the covey the mood the director has in mind for that scene to everyone else in the crew...

The last stage in preparing a set of storyboards, is, naturally, making them look good. What we've crafted so far are a rough template to what the rest of the world will see. They may make sense to you, but will probably not make a whole hell of a lot of sense to anyone else.