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Whether you're making a Hollywood feature film or a goof video for u-tube your video is going to be better if you learn to storyboard. The primary advantage of a storyboard is that it allows you to start thinking in a visual context before you even pick up a camera. If you have a great story in print or even a screen play or a simple outline to start thinking in images if you are ever going to get the project from the paper to the screen. It doesn't matter if you draw stick figures to be able to see if you want a close up or a crane shot to communicate your message Or let's say you have a thousand clips or photos you want to put into a meaningful story. You can lay out the sequence and logic of your images in a storyboard and save yourself hours and hours of wasted edits.

I first got involved with storyboards in 1989. While working for an ad agency with a creative director named Peter Farago. I created a program from an idea Peter had for putting black and white concept boards on a Mac SE and sending them via modem to our client in Chicago, Quaker Oats. The project was semi-successful and got us a lot of attention from Apple that allowed me to translate that exposure into steady work for the next ten years. But all the time I was working on other projects I was thinking about storyboarding and how to use it. I used them to lay out interactive kiosks, plan training videos, and setting up large scale corporate meeting presentations and even for designing websites.. Each and every time I used a storyboard it was easier to communicate what I was thinking to the rest of the team. It seemed that in each case a picture was worth a thousand ( or at least a couple of hundred) words of explanation. If you can visualize a scene then you can storyboard it.

Though I have seen beautiful storyboards that deserve a gallery of their own. A storyboard is a means to an end. The end product is the video, whether it be a Wilford Brimley commercial or Ironman. One of the steps along the way is the photography, using a camera. Before you have to use a camera you have to plan just what it is you are going to shoot and where you're going to shoot it which actors if any are going to be in the scene. All of these sometimes unpredictable variables can be tried out in a storyboard before you pack the van and head for a location. If you can start your brain, and probably as importantly, your crew's brains, to think in images and frame composition and editing sequence the

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