A storyboard is a graphic organizer, in the form of illustrations or images, displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a multimedia product. The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was actually developed at Walt Disney Productions during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Walt Disney and other animation studios.

Storyboards help you rapidly and inexpensively plan a multimedia product.

The panels in your storyboard should tell a clear and coherent story, providing enough detail for others (including potential users) to provide feedback. The storyboard includes representations of each screen in your product, including information about what happens when users mouse over, click on, or otherwise interact with each interactive element in the product. The storyboard should answer questions like: How do users interact with this element? What happens when they do? Which screen are they taken to after they click?

In multimedia production, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called “animatics” to give a better idea of how the product will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together. A still image may include a finger or mouse clicking on an interactive element, triggering the transition to the next screen.

This allows the animators and directors to work out any issues that may exist with the current storyboard. The storyboard and soundtrack are amended if necessary, and a new animatic may be created and reviewed until the storyboard is perfected. Editing the multimedia product at the animatic stage can avoid creation of scenes, art, and music that would be edited out of the product. A few minutes of multimedia product usually equates to months of work for a team, meaning that all that labor (and salaries already paid) will have to be written off if the final product simply does not work. In the context of computer animation, storyboarding helps minimize the construction of unnecessary scene components and models, just as it helps live-action filmmakers evaluate what portions of sets need not be constructed because they will never come into the frame. Multimedia production is an expensive and labor-intensive process, so there should be a minimum of “deleted scenes” if the product is to be completed within budget.

Often storyboards are animated with simple zooms and pans to simulate camera movement. These animations can be combined with available animatics, sound effects and dialog to create a presentation of how a product could be put together. Some feature film DVD special features include production animatics.

Animatics are also used by advertising agencies to create inexpensive test commercials. A variation, the “rip-o-matic”, is made from scenes of existing movies, television programs or commercials, to simulate the look and feel of the proposed commercial. Rip, in this sense, refers to ripping-off an original work to create a new one.