storyboard

A storyboard is a sequential series of illustrations, stills, rough sketches, and/or captions (sometimes resembling a comic or cartoon strip) of events, as seen through the camera lens, that outline the various shots, indicate camera angles, blocking of actors, and the size of the frame. They provide a synopsis for a proposed film story (or for a complex scene) with its action and characters; the storyboards are displayed in sequence for the purpose of visually mapping out and crafting the various shot divisions and indicating camera movements in an animated or live-action film. A blank storyboard is a piece of paper with rectangles drawn on it to represent the camera frame (for each successive shot). A sophisticated type of preview-storyboard (often shot and edited on video, with a soundtrack) is termed an "animatic."