The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

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WORKSHEET: STORYBOARDING
Teachers’ note:
Almost every animation starts with a storyboard. When working in 
animation on a professional level it is vital, as a storyboard artist, 
to produce a crystal clear storyboard that you can pass on to the 
animation artists.
To draw an effective storyboard, students will need a grasp of 
fi lm language, and many of the preceding exercises will act as a 
grounding for this.
Download and print the handout: Storyboard Template
.
A4 is 
generally too small a format to include all the information a 
storyboard needs. It’s better to scale up the template to A3 or A2, 
using it as a guide. Note the three boxes. The larger boxes will 
contain the key frame drawings for each shot. The 
Action
box 
will contain a description of the visible action within the shot. This 
is a guide for the animator and should not be confused with the 
narration. (It is the same as the Action column in the handout: The 
Headless Smuggler Script Example
.
) The 
SFX, Narration
box will 
contain the narration and/or dialogue and sound effects, once again 
following the format of the script example. You will immediately see 
why, for more complex projects, it might well be tidier to write out the 
Action
and 
SFX, Narration
as a separate script. If so, make sure 
the shot numbers tally between script and storyboard.
For a preliminary exercise in storyboarding, download the 
self-explanatory handout: Storyboard Sequencing. Students can 
then watch the fi nal fi lm that was made from the storyboard, to 
see if they sequenced the shots in the same way as the artist.
Follow this up by asking the students to write a six-frame storyboard 
for a story of their own.
You might also wish to download the handout: Storyboard Example: 
A Decent Excuse. A study of this will help students to understand 
the purpose of a storyboard before they draw their own. It follows 
a simpler format to the template, combining key frame drawings of 
each shot with action and shot timing only.

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