Since animation is a long process, it helps to plan ahead, especially if you’re working with a large group of people instead of alone. You may have a good idea of exactly how your story and film will look in your head, but how do you communicate that idea to other people? That’s where storyboards come in.

A storyboard is pretty much what it sounds like: a board for your story. A storyboard acts as a visual representation of still images of your film, highlighting each important moment of a film, drawn and presented in sequence, similar to a picture book. It has key movements and events all visually represented, as well as camera angles and camera movements.

Storyboards themselves don’t have dialogue balloons, so they’re not like a comic book version of the movie. They leave out the dialogue and all the details and just focus on what the visual will be. Sometimes they add big arrows to indicate if something is zooming in or moving left or right, but they put the dialogue or important information underneath, or have someone go through the storyboards as they present them.

Check out a great comparison of the storyboard for the opening sequence of The Lion King with the final animation of the same sequence. It shows a great example of the storyboards all matching the subject and camera angles of the final animation they had created. This precision not only gives people a clearer understanding of the story and what is going to happen, but it also helps the animators immensely.