Concept Art and Storyboarding

Not everything revolves around post-production, as much as I would like it to. In fact, most films spend the majority of their time pre-production, or the development stage. This is where lots of fun stuff (an some not-so-fun stuff) happens, and one of those things is storyboarding. Used more often in the "old" days of making movies, drawing storyboards is the process of drawing what each shot will look like, so as to convey the director's vision to the rest of the crew.

George Lucas did this in the 1970's when nobody knew what he was talking about when he discussed his big ideas for the Star Wars Universe. He contracted Ralph McQuarrie to paint some concept art so he could convince the studio execs at Fox what he was talking about. Below are some examples of his first concept paintings from Star Wars:

Very cool stuff. Obviously, it worked for George Lucas. 

Now on to some storyboard examples:

Anyway. I am taking a storyboarding class right now and we have to storyboard a scene for our final project, and so I went into Adobe Illustrator and created a 9.4"x4" storyboard template (which is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio) with room for a scene number and some lines for a description. And that's free for you to download and use in the production of your film! It's on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper to make it easy. So just right-click, and save image as...