Glossary
Storyboard
Definition
A storyboard is a scene-by-scene plan of a video that pairs each part of the script with a description or sketch of what appears on screen, made before production starts.
What “storyboard” means
A classic storyboard looks like a comic strip: a series of panels, each showing a shot, with notes below for the dialogue or narration, the camera move, the duration and any sound. For motion design, panels often describe the layout and the animation (“chart bars grow left to right on ‘every year’”) rather than camera angles.
Storyboards can be rough. Stick figures and boxes are fine; the point is to decide what each moment shows before anyone spends hours animating it. A timed version of a storyboard, cut to the voice track, is called an animatic.
Why it matters for short explainer videos
In a 60-second short, every scene has a few seconds to do its job. A storyboard forces you to answer, line by line, “what does the viewer see while hearing this?” Sentences with no picture behind them are usually the ones to cut or rephrase.
It’s also the cheapest point to fix problems. Changing a line in a storyboard takes seconds; changing it after the render means re-producing the scene.
Example
Scene 3 of a short about compound interest. Narration: “Year one, you earn 50 dollars on 1,000.” Visual: a coin stack labeled 1,000 with a small stack of 50 appearing on top. Scene 4: “Year two, you earn interest on 1,050.” Visual: the whole stack, now labeled 1,050, grows slightly more. The storyboard shows the comparison in two panels before anything is animated.
In Motiongist
How Motiongist handles it
Motiongist offers an optional storyboard review before rendering, at no credit cost. The engine writes the plan (the title and each scene with its narration and what it should show) in about a minute; you can edit the narration of each scene, then approve the render, which uses your edited plan as is.
After a render, the video’s own storyboard becomes editable: scenes you didn’t touch keep their visuals and edited scenes are rebuilt. You don’t draw panels; you describe intent in words, and the engine designs the visuals. The free storyboard generator gives you a text storyboard from any script.