can you start with a story board

[Kim Welch]

i just wonder if you can make a story board and then tie everything together. you know how you have a great idea for a movie and you see it in your mind and maybe the main outline of it... I wonder if anyone has done this.

 

[Digigenic]

Absolutely,
It's done more often than we think.

By design, many movies are developed from just one inspiring image. Like an illustration or photograph that catches your eye, and sparks the imagination, creating a series of images flashed one right after the other to animate an entire sequence of events in one's mind; this creates stories. It happens so fast that many of us don't bother to think twice about it, but that's what we do every time we stare at a photograph for more than 5 seconds, we start to move it with our eyes, analyze it, and apply our imaginations.
Many directors developed their perception of storytelling based on comic book illustrations.
If you feel that is the best method for materializing your story, then I say go ahead, you've got to get it out of your head one way or another, it can only be beneficial.

 

[MarkG]

Actually, a couple of the shorts I've worked on for other people never had scripts, only storyboards with dialog written underneath when required. If you're the director and producer as well as the writer it's quite possible to skip the whole scripting stage and just draw out the movie on paper.

 

[TKRoman]

I think it's easier to do the script in the caption of the storyboards if you are, like MarkG said, both the director and the writer. I know that some non-directing writers actually also use storyboards in order to better visualize and describe what they're writing; also, it helps with continuity, such as if the character walks in carrying an object, and then the writer forgets and has him pick it up later. Such things will be caught in the storyboards, which lends to better and more fluid writing. So you could either scrap the script, or do both simultaneously