For a long time I felt vaguely guilty about not storyboarding properly. Real filmmakers had beautiful boards. Mine were stick figures and I could not draw, so I mostly did not bother, and I assumed this was a deficiency.

What I eventually worked out is that a storyboard is not primarily a planning tool. It is a communication tool, and if there is nobody to communicate with, most of the reason for it disappears.

What boards are actually for

On a production with a crew, the board answers questions before they are asked.

The camera operator knows what the frame is. The gaffer knows where the light needs to come from. The production designer knows what will be visible. The assistant director knows how many setups there are and can build a schedule.

That is an enormous amount of coordination achieved without a meeting, and it is why boards exist on any production of size.

If you are shooting alone, or with one other person who is in the conversation anyway, none of that applies. The information transfer is happening verbally, continuously, for free.

What replaces it for small productions

Not nothing. The planning function is real, it just does not require drawings.

A shot list, written in words, does most of it. Scene, shot description, lens if it matters, why the shot exists. Twenty minutes of typing rather than two days of drawing.

Photographs from the location, taken during the scout, with notes about where things go. These are more useful than drawings for anything spatial, because they are accurate about the space in a way a sketch is not.

And a floor plan, which is the thing I now use most. A rough overhead diagram showing where people are, where the camera is, and which way it is pointing. This catches problems drawings do not, particularly continuity of screen direction.

When boards are worth it even alone

A few situations where I do make them, badly, and they earn their time.

Anything with visual effects, where the composite has to be planned and the elements have to line up.

Action or anything cut fast, where the sequence of frames is the content and you need to see whether it flows.

Anything expensive or unrepeatable. A single day at a location you cannot return to is worth planning to the frame.

And anything where a shot depends on a precise relationship between elements — a reveal, a match cut, a transition built in camera.

Outside those, a shot list and a floor plan have never let me down.

The drawing quality question

Worth addressing because it stops people.

Professional storyboard artists draw well and that is their job. A director's board is frequently terrible and completely functional, because what it needs to communicate is framing, position and movement, and stick figures convey all three.

What matters is the frame edge, roughly where things are within it, and an arrow showing movement. That is it. Anatomy and perspective are not the information.

I have seen boards from productions I admired and a reasonable number of them are worse than mine, which was both reassuring and slightly deflating.

The alternative that has largely replaced them

For anything complex, walking the location with a phone and shooting the sequence roughly is faster than drawing it and considerably more informative.

You find out immediately whether a move is possible, whether the eyeline works, whether the space is big enough for the lens you had in mind.

Drawings let you plan shots that cannot be achieved. A phone in the actual location does not.

This is what previsualisation is on large productions, done in three dimensions with software, and the phone version is the same idea at zero cost.

What I do now

Location photographs during the scout, always.

A floor plan per scene, hand drawn, ugly.

A written shot list, with the purpose of each shot noted, because writing why a shot exists is the fastest way to discover that it does not need to.

A phone walkthrough for anything with movement or anything I am unsure about.

And drawn frames only for the handful of shots where the exact composition is the point.

The guilt part

I mention this because I suspect it is common. There is a set of practices associated with proper filmmaking, and not doing them produces a sense of being an amateur.

Most of those practices exist to solve coordination problems that arise at scale. Applied to a two person shoot they are ceremony.

The useful question about any of them is what problem it solves and whether you have that problem. Boards solve communication. If you have nobody to communicate with, you do not have the problem, and the time is better spent looking at the location.

Boards as a pitching tool

One use I did not mention and which is genuinely separate. Boards are frequently made to sell an idea rather than to shoot it.

A client, a commissioner or a funder cannot read a shot list and picture anything. A sequence of frames tells them what the thing will look like, and it is often the document that gets the project approved.

These boards are made to a different standard, generally by someone who can draw, and they are closer to concept art than to production paperwork.

Which is worth knowing, because the impressive boards people see published are usually of this kind, and comparing your working documents against them is comparing two unrelated things.