a story board is a drawing or sketch of a scene possibly with a short description or notes to accompany it .

If you’re familiar with any animation it may help to think of storyboards as drawn out key frames.

A storyboard is a story of a tv commercial drawn on a piece of board. The purpose of storyboard is to help art director and the client to understand what the commercial is about before it produced, meaning before the public has view this tv commercial/ this commercial on air. Before the commercial on air, there is a script, telling what the commercial is about. After art director had approved the script, he will ask the illustrator to visualise the script, meaning drawing out the story. Then during the presentation, he and his colleagues will bring this storyboard, script and copy (words, dialogues etc) to meet the client and explain to them (normally it will be a whole bunch of people) what will the commercial is like. After the client had accepted without doing any changes (which is less than 1%, as 99% of clients think that they are much smarter than those creative guys working in the advertising agency, If the client insists want to change, then the art director will need to come out another idea and do the whole thing again ), then they will start production, meaning start shooting of this commercial. Now, the storyboard which client had approved will be bring to the spot, photographer, director, light engineer and etc will follow (meaning close-up, background, colour, angle etc)the storyboard and do the shooting. After finish shooting, the director will pass it together with the storyboard, script & copy for post production if needed. Otherwise, they will start editing and they will follow the storyboard and make sure that the commercial will be the same as the approved storyboard. In short, the storyboard is the picture version of the script of a tv commercial.

You might want to follow this link…it depends upon how you use the word

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard

Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.

Origins

The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Walt Disney and other animation studios.

In the biography of her father, The Story of Walt Disney (Henry Holt, 1956), Diane Disney Miller explains that the first complete storyboards were created for the 1933 Disney short Three Little Pigs. According to John Canemaker, in Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards (1999, Hyperion Press), the first storyboards at Disney evolved from comic-book like “story sketches” created in the 1920s to illustrate concepts for animated cartoon short subjects such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie.

According to Christopher Finch in The Art of Walt Disney (Abrams, 1973), Disney credited animator Webb Smith with creating the idea of drawing scenes on separate sheets of paper and pinning them up on a bulletin board to tell a story in sequence, thus creating the first storyboard.

One of the first live action films to be completely storyboarded was Gone with the Wind. William Cameron Menzies, the film’s production designer, was hired by David Selznik to design every shot of the film. Many large budget silent films were also storyboarded but most of this material has been lost during the reduction of the studio archives during the 1970’s.

Storyboarding became popular in live-action film production during the early 1940s, and grew into a standard medium for previsualization of films: “We can see the last half century … as the period in which production design was largely characterized by adoption of the storyboard,” wrote curator Annette Michelson in a 1993 catalog for the Pace Gallery exhibit Drawing into Film: Director’s Drawings, which featured storyboards of popular films.

Storyboarding’s most recent use is outlining websites and other interactive media projects during the design phase.

Film

A film storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.

In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens. And in the case of interactive media, it is the layout and sequence in which the user or viewer sees the content or information. In the storyboarding process, most technical details involved in crafting a film or interactive media project can be efficiently described either in picture, or in additional text.

Some live-action film directors, such as Joel and Ethan Coen, used storyboard extensively before taking the pitch to their funders, stating that it helps them get the figure they are looking for since they can show exactly where the money will be used. Other directors storyboard only certain scenes, or not at all. Animation directors are usually required to storyboard extensively, sometimes in place of doing a script.

Animatics

In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called “animatics” to give a better idea of how the scene 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. More commonly, a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track is added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together.

This allows the animators and directors to work out any screenplay, camera positioning, shot list and timing 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 with the director until the storyboard is perfected. Editing the film at the animatic stage can avoid animation of scenes that would be edited out of the film. Animation is usually an expensive process, so there should be a minimum “deleted scenes” if the film is to be completed within budget.

Often storyboards are animated with simple zooms and pans to simulate camera movement (using non-linear editing software). These animations can be combined with available animatics, sound effects and dialog to create a presentation of how a film could be shot and cut together. Some feature film DVD special features include production animatics.

Business

Storyboards were adapted from the film industry to business, purportedly by Howard Hughes of Hughes Aircraft. Today they are used by industry for planning ad campaigns, commercials, a proposal or other projects intended to convince or compel to action.

A “quality storyboard” is a tool to help facilitate the introduction of a quality improvement process into an organisation.

Design comics are a type of storyboard used to include a customer or other characaters into a narrative. Design comics are most often used in designing web sites or illustrating product usage scenarios during design.

Interactive media

More recently the term “storyboard” has been used in the fields of web development, software development and instructional design to present and describe interactive events as well as audio and motion, particularly on user interfaces, electronic pages and presentation screens. An interactive media storyboard may be used in the graphical user interface for the user experience design of a website or interactive project as well as a visual tool for planning the content. In contrast, a site map or flow chart may be better to plan the information architecture, navigation, links, organization and total user experience, especially when the sequence of events is less predictable or the audiovisual change between events is of little design importance.

Benefits

One advantage of using storyboards is that it allows (in film and business) the user to experiment with changes in the storyline to evoke stronger reaction or interest. Flashbacks, for instance, are often the result of sorting storyboards out of chronological order to help build suspense and interest.

The process of visual thinking and planning allows a group of people to brainstorm together, placing their ideas on storyboards and then arranging the storyboards on the wall. This fosters more ideas and generates consensus inside the group.

Creation

Storyboards for films are created in a multiple step process.

The first step is to create “thumbnail” storyboard. These storyboards get their name because they are rough sketches no bigger than your thumbnail. For many motion pictures, thumbnail storyboards is the highest form of storyboards created. This is just enough for the director to communicate to the cinematographer what is needed for each shot of a scene.

If the director or producer wishes, higher quality 2D storyboard images are created. These are created by professional storyboard artists or by using 2D storyboarding programs. These look much better than thumbnail storyboards and they convey more of the mood for the scene. However, this are not completely accurate as artists can draw images which cannot be filmed. Even the 2D storyboard programs can produce gorgeous looking images which cannot be filmed.

Finally, if needed, full 3D storyboards are created. The advantage of 3D storyboards is they show exactly what the film camera will see using the lenses the film camera will use. While it is possible to create 3D storyboards using 3D animation programs such as Maya or Lightwave, some people prefer to use digital puppets with 3D programs such as Poser and DAZ Studio. These programs have a huge collection of inexpensive 3D figures (called “poser figures”) available from 3rd party vendors.

More recently, 3D storyboarding programs have been developed which are designed specifically for filmmakers and cinematographers that create optically-correct format and lens storyboard frames. An example of this kind of program is FrameForge 3D Studio.