Storyboarding
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Storyboarding is the process of planning a film, animated production, or comic sequence by arranging a series of drawings or images in order, each representing a key moment, camera angle, or panel of the finished work before it is produced.
Purpose
A storyboard lets a director, animator, or cartoonist work out pacing, staging, and visual flow cheaply, using rough sketches rather than committing directly to expensive animation, filming, or finished art. Storyboards are typically accompanied by notes on camera movement, dialogue, and timing, and are revised repeatedly during pre-production as a production's story is refined.
In animation
Storyboarding is considered a core step of the animation pipeline. Walt Disney Studios is often credited with formalizing the storyboard process in the early 1930s, pinning sequences of sketches to boards so a whole sequence could be reviewed and reordered at a glance—the origin of the term. Animation studios typically employ dedicated storyboard artists, who work from a script to design the shot-by-shot visual structure of a scene before animators begin full production.
In comics and film
The same underlying technique is used to plan live-action film sequences, especially action and visual-effects-heavy scenes, and informs how comics artists lay out sequential panels to control pacing and visual rhythm across a page.