Storyboarding: Sequential Drawing for Film and Animation Pre-Production

In early 2026, two announcements landed that sent shockwaves through the film industry. Martin Scorsese, a director whose career has been defined by a reverence for film craft and film preservation, partnered with a generative AI company to help build storyboards for a future film. Days later, A24, the studio known for championing auteurs and artisanal filmmaking, announced a $75 million partnership with Google DeepMind to develop AI workflows for storyboarding and other pre-production tasks. Peter Ramsey, the Oscar-winning director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), responded publicly: "I did that job for years. I was often the first on the film alongside the director." Storyboarding has been a foot in the door for generations of filmmakers, and the announcements raised questions about whether AI would close that door. Read more at Film Stories.

Storyboarding is the practice of drawing sequential panels to plan the shots, action, and pacing of a film, animation, or other visual narrative before production begins. A storyboard is a series of sketches, each representing a single shot or camera angle, arranged in order with notes on dialogue, action, camera movement, and timing. It is the visual script of a film, and it is one of the most economic parts of the filmmaking process: a storyboard panel costs a fraction of what a day of shooting costs, and it allows a director to work out ideas at the cheapest possible stage.

This entry covers the history of storyboarding from its invention at Disney in the 1930s to the AI storyboarding tools and controversies of 2026, the artists who defined the practice, and how new technologies are changing the relationship between hand-drawn boards and machine-generated images.

What Is Storyboarding and How Does It Work?

A storyboard is a sequence of panels, each containing a drawing of a single shot. The panels are arranged left to right, top to bottom, like a comic strip. Each panel shows the composition of the shot: who is in the frame, where they are positioned, what the camera angle is, and what action is occurring. Beneath or beside each panel, the storyboard artist writes notes describing the action, dialogue, camera movement, and any other relevant information.

The storyboard serves multiple functions. It allows the director to visualize the film before expensive production begins. It communicates the director's vision to the crew: the cinematographer knows what shots to set up, the production designer knows what needs to be built, the costume designer knows what the actors need to wear. It identifies problems before they become expensive: a sequence that does not work on paper can be revised in minutes, while a sequence that does not work on set can cost thousands of dollars per hour.

Storyboard artists work in different styles depending on the production. Some boards are rough thumbnails, barely more than stick figures, intended to communicate composition and pacing. Others are highly detailed renderings that serve as visual reference for every department. Animation storyboards tend to be more detailed than live-action storyboards because in animation, the storyboard is the primary blueprint for the entire production. In live action, the director and cinematographer may improvise on set, making the storyboard a starting point rather than a strict plan.

Origins and History

The Disney Era (1930s-1940s)

Storyboarding was invented at Walt Disney Studios in the early 1930s. The credit is generally given to Webb Smith, a Disney animator who began drawing individual scenes on separate sheets of paper and pinning them to a corkboard in sequence. This allowed the story team to see the entire film laid out at once, rearrange scenes, and identify pacing problems. The technique was first used systematically on Three Little Pigs (1933, directed by Burt Gillett) and became standard practice at Disney by the time Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) went into production.

Before storyboarding, animation was planned using "story sketches" that were loosely organized. The storyboard formalized the process, making animation production more efficient and more controlled. Disney's story artists, including Ted Sears, Winston Hibler, and Bill Peet, became some of the most important creative voices at the studio. Peet, who worked at Disney from 1937 to 1964, story boarded 101 Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone (1963), and his storyboards were so complete that they served as the primary script for those films.

The Live-Action Era (1940s-2000s)

Storyboarding spread from animation to live-action film in the 1940s. Alfred Hitchcock was famous for storyboarding his films extensively, sometimes to the point where he considered the actual shooting boring because he had already "made the film" on paper. Psycho (1960) was storyboarded shot by shot, including the shower scene, which took three days to shoot and used 70 camera setups for 78 shots and 52 cuts. The storyboard for that scene, drawn by Saul Bass, is a masterclass in visual pacing.

directors who have used storyboards extensively include Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Paul Verhoeven, the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Wes Anderson. Each uses storyboards differently. Scott's boards are highly detailed, almost like production paintings. The Coen brothers storyboard every shot but do not show the boards to the actors. Anderson's boards are precise diagrams that establish his symmetrical compositions. Steven Spielberg, by contrast, is known for storyboarding less and relying on on-set improvisation.

The Digital Era (2000s-2020s)

Digital tools changed storyboarding without fundamentally altering the practice. Software like Toon Boom Storyboard Pro (released in 2007) and Adobe Photoshop allowed storyboard artists to draw digitally, iterate faster, and add timing and animatic features. An animatic is a storyboard turned into a rough video, with panels displayed in sequence with timing, scratch dialogue, and temporary music. Animatics bridge the gap between static storyboard and finished film, allowing directors to test pacing before committing to production.

By the 2020s, storyboard artists were using pressure-sensitive tablets and software like Procreate on iPad alongside traditional pencil and paper. The fundamental skill, drawing, remained unchanged. A storyboard artist needs to be able to draw quickly, communicate composition clearly, and understand cinematic language: shot types, camera movements, editing transitions, and visual pacing.

Key Artists and Pioneers

Webb Smith (1907-1949)

Smith, a Disney animator, is credited with inventing the storyboard in the early 1930s by drawing scenes on separate sheets and pinning them to a board in sequence. The technique transformed animation production from a linear process to a modular one, where scenes could be rearranged, added, or cut before expensive animation work began. Smith's innovation is one of the most consequential production techniques in animation history.

Saul Bass (1920-1996)

Bass was a graphic designer and storyboard artist best known for his title sequences for Hitchcock films including Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and North by Northwest (1959). He also storyboarded key sequences, including the shower scene in Psycho. Bass's storyboards demonstrate how graphic design principles, particularly composition and visual rhythm, apply to sequential drawing. His storyboards for the shower scene are in the Museum of Modern Art collection.

Bill Peet (1915-2002)

Peet was a Disney story artist who worked at the studio from 1937 to 1964. He story boarded 101 Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone (1963), and his storyboards were so complete that they functioned as the script. Peet's drawing style was energetic and expressive, and his storyboards captured character personality and movement with minimal lines. After leaving Disney, he became a successful children's book author and illustrator.

Peter Ramsey (b. 1962)

Ramsey began his career as a storyboard artist on films including Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), and Spider-Man (2002). He transitioned to directing and became the first African American director of a major animated feature with Rise of the Guardians (2012). He co-directed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Ramsey has spoken publicly about how storyboarding was his entry point into the film industry and has criticized AI storyboarding tools that would eliminate that entry path.

AI Storyboarding in 2026

The AI storyboarding landscape in 2026 is divided into two categories of tools. The first takes a script or scene description and generates sequential visual frames, essentially automatic storyboard generation from text. The second takes hand-drawn or rough storyboard panels and refines them into cleaner, more detailed frames. Both types use large language models to parse scripts and image generation models to produce frames.

Tools evaluated in 2026 include Storyboard That (AI features), which maintains character appearance across frames better than most competitors; Boords AI, which exports from storyboard directly to rough animatics with timing controls; Midjourney, whose character consistency features added in 2025 make it viable for generating storyboard panels; and Kling AI, which generates rough animatics from still storyboard panels. The hardest technical problem is character consistency: making the same character look identical across 30 or 40 separate frames. This is easy for a human storyboard artist with a character sheet but difficult for AI, which tends to produce plausible variations rather than exact reproductions. Read more at TapVid Blog.

At CVPR 2026, researchers presented STAGE (SToryboard-Anchored GEneration), a workflow that reformulates keyframe-based multi-shot video generation using start-end frame pairs for each shot. The system introduces a multi-shot memory pack for long-range entity consistency and a dual-encoding strategy for intra-shot coherence. The researchers also contributed the ConStoryBoard dataset, containing high-quality movie clips with annotations for story progression, cinematic attributes, and human preferences. Read the paper at CVPR 2026.

The controversy around AI storyboarding is not purely about technology. It is about labor. Storyboarding has been one of the lowest-paid roles on a film set, but it has also been a training ground and entry point for future directors. When Peter Ramsey says he did that job for years and was often the first on the film alongside the director, he is describing a career path. AI storyboarding tools do not just automate a task. They potentially close a door that generations of filmmakers walked through.

Related Terms

Storyboarding connects to illustration as its parent discipline and to concept art as the preceding stage in pre-production. It relates to composition, as each storyboard panel is a study in framing and visual arrangement. Storyboarding also connects to thumbnail sketches, which are the rough preliminary drawings that storyboard artists use to explore ideas before committing to finished panels. For more on visual storytelling, read our post on the history of digital art, or explore our guide to digital art.

See Storyboards in Person

Storyboard art is rarely exhibited in museums, but it can be found in archives and special collections. The Walt Disney Animation Research Library in Burbank, California, holds storyboards from every Disney animated film, though access is restricted to researchers. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds Saul Bass's storyboards for Psycho. Published art-of books, including The Art of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Art of Disney Animation, reproduce storyboard panels alongside finished film stills.

If you want to understand storyboarding as a practice, pick any film directed by Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, or Wes Anderson and compare the storyboard panels (available in art-of books and online) to the finished shots. You will see how sequential drawing translates into cinematic language. For more on the broader context, read our entries on concept art and illustration, or explore our post on the history of digital art.