Stencil’s storyboarding tools allows you to visualize how your film, documentary, music video, commercial or YouTube video will come together, before you even hit the record button.

Storyboarding Software: Getting Started

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to use Stencil’s built-in storyboarding software tools. So let’s jump in.

To begin, add a new project. Then click on the project to be brought to that project’s main management page. The page will look like this:

From here, click on “script”. If you don’t already have a scene added, add one by clicking on the button in the upper left side of the page. Now, click on the scene you want to add storyboard images to.

From here, we can click on “add”. This will allow us to add shotlist images to our scene which we can then use as our storyboard images.

When adding new shots, there are 4 types of images you can add:

Reference images, storyboard images, location photos, or production stills. So let’s imagine that we’re in pre-production so in our case, we’ll upload some storyboard images by clicking on the storyboard tab. Keep in mind that you can add one image for each image type. For example, I could add a reference image, a storyboard image, a location image and then once the scene is wrapped I could add a production still here as well. Then over on my main writing page, I could just toggle between these images by using the appropriate dropdown.

Adding AI Storyboard Images

But anyways, let’s get back to adding a new image. I’ll click on “add” again, and then I’ll click on “storyboard”. Here, I could either upload a hand-drawn image or I could use Stencil’s built in AI tools to generate a storyboard image for me. I can just enter the prompt in the appropriate input field, select the image style I want to use and then generate the image. Now once the image is generated it will show up on the main writing page if I have “storyboard” selected from the dropdown list.

Adding Storyboard Images For Each Scene

In Stencil, you just continue to go through this process. For each of your scenes, simply continue adding your desired images. Then, once you have a few scenes added, you can jump over to your “plot visualization” page by clicking on the “plot” icon in the left sidebar. On this page you’ll be able to see your storyboard.

Viewing Your Film’s Storyboard

Essentially, what you have here are the shot list images from each scene. You can toggle between each image by using the arrows on the image or the number icons near the bottom of the storyboard images. You can also toggle between different image types by using the drop down near the top of the page. For example, I could view my storyboard’s reference images or my location images.

Using Storyboard Software Will Transform You as a Filmmaker

So as you can see, Stencil offers a very powerful way to create storyboards for your films, documentaries, YouTube videos, music videos or commercials. Stencil’s built in storyboarding tool gives you an at-a-glance view of your entire project from start to finish.

This is valuable because when you’re working in a visual medium, it’s important to try and ensure that the images you have in your imagination are the images that end up being realized on screen. By storyboarding your project in advance you’ll be able to better plan your visuals and see how your final project will come together before you ever even hit the record button.

Storyboarding is an Investment In Yourself & Your Craft

Storyboarding can take time to complete during the pre-production process, but the time you spend storyboarding early on pays dividends later on, when you exceed your expectations with the images you were able to realize on screen.

So if you’re a filmmaker and you’re looking for storyboarding software to help you bring your visual stories to life, then head over to Stencil today to take this storyboarding tool for a test drive.

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