Storyboard: Making the Film Before Making the Film
This is a practical look at how DeeDee Animation Studio approaches storyboarding across different client projects.
Storyboard in Animation
A storyboard is often seen as a collection of rough drawings that shows what happens in a film. But in animation, it is where the film is actually directed.
Before a single frame enters production, the storyboard is where we decide how a story will be seen, felt, and experienced: which shot comes first, how long it lasts, where the camera moves, how a character acts, when an edit happens, and how one moment leads into the next.
At DeeDee Animation Studio, we’ve worked on storyboards for a range of projects, from series and commercial work to short films and projects involving well-known IPs. Over time, these projects have taught us that good storyboarding is about making the right filmmaking decisions early, when changing your mind is still affordable.
At this stage, the director, either independently or together with a team of storyboard artists, makes almost every decision related to cinematic storytelling.
When the storyboards are edited into an animatic, they should ideally represent around 90% of what the final film will communicate from a storytelling perspective. This includes shot length, character acting, shot choices, camera movements and angles, editing decisions such as cuts and transitions, shot positioning, and cinematography decisions such as composition and lens effects.
The drawings themselves do not need to look polished. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of storyboarding is that everything is still allowed to be a draft.
The drawings should remain simple enough that changes can be made quickly, with as little time and effort as possible. This makes storyboarding one of the most efficient stages of production for exploring ideas, especially when budget and schedule matter.
And that freedom to change is extremely important: it gives us more room to explore ideas and test different filmmaking decisions before they become expensive to change.
What Real Productions Taught Us About Storyboarding
DeeDee Animation Studio’s scope of work goes beyond being an outsourcing animation partner. We have practical experience delivering storyboards for both short and series projects, including OMG Yes! for Adult Swim, How to Become a Cult Leader for Netflix, and projects involving DC characters, such as Justice League: Cosmic Chaos, among others.
Each project comes with its own visual language, production requirements, and expectations. More importantly, working across different projects has taught us that storyboarding is not simply about drawing what is in your head.
What Do Clients Usually Expect From a Storyboard?
Clients usually expect to see good drawings in storyboards and competent directing sensibilities in animatics.
A storyboard artist needs to understand what the production needs, what the client expects, and how their decisions will eventually translate into animation.
This becomes especially important when managing a team of story artists with different styles, both in drawing and directing. The job of the team lead is to find common ground between them while utilizing each individual’s strengths in the right place, so that the final product remains unified and clear.
Another significant challenge is action.
Dynamic action and complex camera angles are not always easy to create in a 2D storyboard pipeline. In these cases, we occasionally apply some 3D elements to the storyboards to help clients better understand the spatial relationships, camera movements, and what is happening in the animatic.
Series and Shorts Need Different Storyboard Strategies
Creating storyboards for a series and a short film is not the same.
For series, storyboards and animatics are usually much more polished, with near on-model characters, plenty of key animated frames, and clean drawings of both characters and backgrounds, while still maintaining a grayscale or black-and-white look.
This allows production to run more smoothly and reduces individual interpretations from animators, helping avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.
Therefore, we usually aim to make storyboards and animatics for series very tight, with production sticking as closely to the animatics as possible when it comes to creative decisions. The goal is to avoid too many creative retakes throughout production and make the process more sustainable for a series that may continue for a long time.
Shorts and feature films are different. Since the production is more contained, there is generally more room for artists and animators to be creative during animation and background painting.
They are allowed to explore more in order to make the best possible single product, rather than having to follow a tightly controlled timeline across a large volume of work.
From Rough Drawings to a Production-Ready Animatic
At DeeDee, our storyboard workflow generally follows this structure:
Rough Storyboards → Feedback → Clean Storyboards → Feedback → Final Storyboards → Animatic Editing → Feedback → Final
We start with rough storyboards to establish the storytelling and directing choices.
At this point, the priority is not polish. It is getting the sequence to work.
After feedback from the client or director, we move into clean storyboards, refining the drawings and making the visual information clearer.
The final storyboard incorporates notes and dialogue before moving into animatic editing.
This is where the sequence starts behaving more like a film. Individual storyboard panels are brought together through cuts, transitions, timing, and, when needed, draft music, sound effects, and voice.
The process is iterative, but that is precisely the point. Storyboarding gives us a space to solve creative problems while they are still relatively easy and affordable to change.
What We Keep Coming Back to
After working across different storyboard projects, formats, clients, and production requirements, one principle continues to stand out:
The value of a storyboard is not measured by how polished the drawings look. It is measured by how effectively it helps the team make the film.
This principle also shapes how we develop our artists.
Our experience from real production projects has helped us build an internal storyboarding training course grounded in real-world production experience rather than theory alone. Artists participating in the course can gain hands-on experience making storyboards and applying their knowledge within a production context.
In turn, this helps us build a stronger common foundation across the team so that artists can work from the same understanding of storytelling, production requirements, and visual communication when taking on future projects.
For us, this is the real value of learning through production: every project does not just deliver a finished film. It also adds experience that makes the next project better.
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