How do screenplays and storyboards work?

Before a single frame is shot, a film is a screenplay: a script typed in a strict, old-fashioned layout. Every page uses 12-point Courier, a typewriter font where every letter is the same width, and fixed margins for each part.

Each scene starts with a scene heading: inside or outside (INT. or EXT.), the place, and the time of day. Then action says what we see. A character name in capitals sits above that person's dialogue, which runs in a narrow column. A parenthetical gives a hint on how to say a line, and a transition such as CUT TO: moves us on.

Why so strict? Because the layout makes a neat rule of thumb: one page ≈ one minute of screen time. A 110-page script makes a film of about two hours. Producers use it to budget, and assistant directors split every page into eighths to plan how much to shoot each day. It is only a rough guide: a page of fast chatter plays quicker, and a page that says "the battle begins" can take ten minutes.

The scene on this page is ours, and every other chapter films it: Meera, 11, her broken kite, and her grandfather on a Mumbai rooftop.

Before writing scenes, many writers plan the beats: the big turning points of the story. They write each on an index card and pin the cards to a board, in order, so they can see the whole film at once and move things around.

The most common shape is three acts. Act I sets up the hero and their world, until an inciting incident knocks it over. Act II, the longest, is the struggle, with a midpoint twist in the middle. Act III brings the climax and the resolution. Syd Field drew this "paradigm" in 1979 for a 120-page script: roughly pages 1–30, 30–90 and 90–120.

Other maps say the same thing in more detail. Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (1949) found one pattern in myths from all over the world. Blake Snyder's Save the Cat (2005) gives 15 beats with page numbers. Indian films add something special: the interval. Writers place a huge twist just before it, the "interval bang", so the audience comes back from their samosas desperate to know what happens.

None of these are rules. They are tools for checking that the tension keeps rising, and that nothing sags for 20 pages.

A script says what happens. A storyboard shows how the audience will see it: a comic strip of the film, one drawing per shot. The director and a storyboard artist decide, line by line, where the camera goes.

First choice: the shot size. An extreme wide shot (EWS) shows the whole place and sets the scene. A wide shot (WS) shows a whole person. A medium shot (MS) cuts at the waist. A close-up (CU) fills the frame with a face, so we feel what they feel. An extreme close-up (ECU) picks out one detail. The lens stays the same here: the camera simply moves closer.

Second: the angle. At eye level we are equals. A low angle looks up and makes someone powerful; a high angle looks down and makes them small. A Dutch angle tilts the horizon to make us uneasy.

Third: the move. A pan turns the camera left or right, and a tilt nods it up or down, both from one spot. A dolly rolls the whole camera closer, and a track slides it alongside the action. Artists draw moves as arrows on the panel.

Many directors draw their own boards. Satyajit Ray sketched his shots in notebooks; Alfred Hitchcock planned films so fully that he said the shoot was the boring part.

From the storyboard, the director and the cinematographer make a shot list: every camera set-up needed for each scene. Moving the camera and lights takes time, so a day is planned around set-ups, not scenes.

A dialogue scene is usually filmed several times over, called coverage. First a master: one wide shot of the whole scene. Then over-the-shoulder shots (OTS), looking past one person at the other. Then close-ups of each face. The editor can now cut between them and choose the best moment of every take.

All of this obeys the 180-degree rule. Imagine a line through the two characters. Keep every camera on one side of it, and Meera always stays on screen right, Nana on screen left, and they look at each other across the cut. Put a camera on the other side and they jump sides: the audience feels lost for a moment. Directors do cross the line, but on purpose, usually by moving the camera across it in a shot so we see it happen.

A storyboard on a wall has no timing. So the next step is an animatic: the panels are put on a timeline, each held for as long as its shot will last, with temp sound, rough dialogue read by anyone and borrowed music. Suddenly you can feel whether the scene drags or rushes, long before paying a crew.

Animation studios live by animatics. Disney built "story reels" of drawings in the 1930s, and Pixar still rebuilds every film as a reel again and again before animating a frame. Live-action directors use them for anything expensive or dangerous.

Pre-vis (previsualisation) goes one step further: the scene is built as a simple 3D model with virtual cameras, like this box does. George Lucas cut together old war-film dogfights to plan the space battles of Star Wars (1977). In India, Firefly Creative Studio did a lot of pre-vis for Baahubali's war scenes, so the director, fight master, cinematographer and VFX team all worked from the same plan. For RRR's animal stampede, pre-vis worked out how fast each animal would run, and those numbers drove a strip of LED lights on set so the camera and actors knew exactly where the leap would happen.

Our scene fills about half a page (29 of the 54 lines), so the page rule says it should run about 30 seconds. Does your animatic agree?

Now you are the director. The scene is on the page: Meera, the torn kite, Nana and the wind. You have six shots to tell it. For each one choose the moment, the shot size, the angle, who to frame, which side of the line the camera stands, and how long it lasts.

The board starts as a rough first try, full of classic mistakes. The checklist on the right shows what an editor would grumble about: no establishing shot, jump cuts between shots that look almost the same, a camera that crosses the line, no close-up when feelings run high, and a scene that never reaches its payoff.

There is no single right answer. Great directors break every rule, but they know they are doing it. Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa all planned their films shot by shot on paper first, and then felt free on set.