Although I have been creating storyboards for my books for many years, I was curious to know how to make them for film. Are they different? This summer I took a storyboarding class at RISD with the talented
Drew Gormley and learned there are many differences. As a picture book artist, the one that I found most notable is that in film there is more time and space to tell your story. When you storyboard for a picture book, you have a limited number of pages (usually 32 for most traditional picture books) and you lose the first 3 or 4 pages to front matter. The images you choose to tell your story are limited to the remaining 28 or 29 pages. But in a storyboard for film, you are creating camera shots rather than pages and while each shot must move the story forward, there is more freedom to spend a little time within a scene if necessary to create drama, build suspense or land a punchline.
The prompt for this little storyboard was; a tortoise, a lady, and a bench.
