A great video requires detailed planning, and if you’re planning something visual to carry out a certain flow or organization, you’re going to need a play-by-play idea of how your visuals will tell your story. Making a storyboard is not an option, it’s a must. At WAYPOINT, our creative services aim to deliver the most clear and well-developed concepts to help our clients achieve the responses they want from their audiences. The following breakdown will show you how making a storyboard impacts the production process.
Script Writing
Your script should go along with the visuals in your video. You may write a script before designing a storyboard, however, as you work on your storyboard, you’ll find that certain visuals might need titles or call-outs on the screen to help transmit your message. See below for an example that shows how script lines are combined with images on a storyboard.
Shooting Live Action / Capturing Footage
Whether you’re shooting live or capturing in-game/app footage for a video, you should have an exact idea of what kind of footage you need in order to put together your vision. When you make a storyboard, you may draw sketches of scenes you want to capture or add screenshots of already existing footage/graphics and describe them in full written detail as well to ensure that you and/or your team don’t miss anything. This is especially true for trailers since these are normally only 60 seconds long and your message must come across quickly and effectively.
Audio
Music or voice-overs are crucial for video productions. Your storyboard should not only indicate the visual order of the action in your video but also the placement and type of audio per shot. Adding time codes can really help you pinpoint exactly when an audio track should start/stop playing or when there should be an audio transition to fit the story-line. Combining audio descriptions with images on your storyboard will also help you keep track of the audio you need to record during live action or footage capture.
Post Production / Editing
When you reach the last step in production, you want to make sure you have everything you need to polish your vision. With a detailed storyboard, you’ve already recorded the footage and audio you need, and now it’s time to add some video effects, motion graphics, logo animations, end card, etc., as needed. In a perfect world, there is no back-tracking once you’ve reached post production, so you want to make sure you save yourself extra work by cautiously planning every step of the way.
Moral of the story… BOARD it! Trust us, it could save your video’s life.
