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How to Make a Paper Storyboard

The aim of storyboards is to offer your visual interpretation of the script. Your storyboards not only record your script but reveal your interpretation of the narrative and your vision as a filmmaker. French critic Andre Bazin believed that "mise-en-scene" (arranging the elements of the scene and the camera's relationship to them so as to preserve their physical reality) is a more natural technique than montage.

Things You'll Need

  • paper and pencil
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Instructions

  1. Paper Storyboards

    • 1

      Develop psychological and aesthetic ideas in order to express your attitude towards your characters and convey your sensibilities. Sometimes filmmakers choose to tell a story through the POV (point of view) of their main characters. Through a close-up (a shot of a character at close distance) the filmmaker can convey transparent reactions of the protagonist. Through a reaction shot (a shot of the subject looking off screen) the filmmaker can show a character's emotional response to a particular action in the context of a scene.

    • 2

      Use various choices of camera angles to show how you feel about the characters or how you want your audience to feel about them. A high camera angle makes your viewers look down on your subject. A low camera angle makes them look up. If you assume the omniscient point of view, use long shots that create a broad distance between the camera and the subject.

    • 3

      Visualize your camera movements. Carefully draw your pans and tilts. A pan is a horizontal movement of the camera in a shot from point A to point B. A tilt is a vertical camera movement.

    • 4

      Experienced, imaginative storytellers have a variety of visual tools to show transitions between scenes, all of which can be conveyed in your storyboards. For example, a dissolve is an overlapping transition between two shots. A fade out is a transition in which your shot gradually darkens to black. A fade in is the reverse--a black screen gradually brightening to reveal an image.

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