Shot List vs. Storyboard
Three tools plan a shoot before it happens — the shot list, the storyboard, and the floor plan — and beginners constantly confuse them. They're not competitors; they answer different questions. Knowing which does what tells you which to reach for, and which you can skip.
"Do I need a storyboard?" is one of the most common questions I get from new directors, and it's usually the wrong question — because they're picturing a storyboard doing a shot list's job, or vice versa. These three tools overlap, but each answers a different question about your scene. Get the questions straight and you'll never over-plan a simple scene or under-plan a complex one again.
Shot List
Answers what you're shooting: every setup, described and numbered. Exhaustive, fast to make, easy to change. The backbone of the shoot.
Storyboard
Answers what it looks like: the composition inside each frame. Sells the vision, solves tricky staging, but slow to draw and revise.
Floor Plan
Answers where things go: actor blocking and camera positions in the physical space. Solves geography, the 180° line, and lighting.
Three questions, three tools. The shot list is the one you'll always make; the storyboard and floor plan are specialists you deploy where a scene actually needs them.
The shot list: what you're shooting
The shot list, from Chapter 1, is your master document. It's text, so it's fast to write, faster to change, and it can cover an entire film without you drawing a thing. It's exhaustive — every setup accounted for — which is exactly what you need for scheduling and for making sure nothing's forgotten. What it can't do is show you what a shot will actually look like. A row that says "CU, push in, her face as it lands" tells you the shot exists; it doesn't reveal the composition. That's where the storyboard comes in.
The storyboard: what it looks like
A storyboard is a comic-strip of your film — a drawn frame for each shot showing composition, headroom, where subjects sit in the frame, and how one image cuts to the next. Its superpower is visual communication: it gets everyone seeing the same movie, and it lets you solve a tricky sequence (an action beat, a complex reveal, a VFX shot) on paper before it costs you a day. Its weakness is time — drawing boards is slow, and revising them is slower. That's why smart low-budget filmmakers don't storyboard everything; they board the handful of scenes where the visual is complicated or the stakes are high, and shot-list the rest. And you don't need to draw well — stick figures, or a tool that generates frames, work fine.
The floor plan: where everything goes
The overhead floor plan (or blocking diagram) is the most underrated of the three. It's a bird's-eye map of the location with actors' positions and paths marked, and little camera symbols showing where the camera sits for each setup. This is the tool that solves geography — it's how you keep the 180-degree line straight (Chapter 8), plan a moving camera, position your lights, and make sure your shots will actually cut together spatially. For a blocking-heavy scene — several actors moving through a room, a walk-and-talk, anything where "who's where" gets confusing — ten minutes with a floor plan prevents the on-set headache where nothing lines up.
Which do you actually need?
Here's the honest, budget-minded answer:
- Always: the shot list. Every scene, every project. It's fast, free, and it drives your whole schedule. Non-negotiable.
- Sometimes: the storyboard. For action, complex staging, VFX, or a signature visual moment — anywhere the picture is hard to hold in words. Board those; skip the simple stuff.
- Sometimes: the floor plan. For blocking-heavy scenes, moving cameras, or anywhere the spatial geography is tricky. A rough overhead sketch is often enough.
They also work best together: the shot list is the spine, and the storyboard and floor plan hang off specific rows of it when those rows need extra planning. Number a storyboard frame "42C" to match your shot list, and now your text, your visual, and your schedule all speak the same language.
I wasted a whole weekend once storyboarding a dialogue scene — two people at a table, talking. Beautiful boards. Total waste: a dialogue scene is a solved problem you can shot-list in five minutes (Chapter 8). Meanwhile I didn't board the one genuinely tricky shot in the film, a oner that wove through three rooms, and we spent half a shoot day discovering on our feet what a floor plan would have told me in ten minutes. Lesson learned: match the tool to the difficulty. Board and diagram the hard scenes; shot-list everything. Effort spent planning the easy stuff is effort stolen from the hard stuff. — WR
With the three tools sorted, you know the shot list is the one you'll live in — so the rest of this course goes deep on it. But a shot list is only as good as the vocabulary you fill it with. Next, we learn the language of shots themselves: the sizes, from wide to extreme close-up, and what each one says.
Turn your shot list into visuals — sketch each shot's framing so your crew sees the plan, not just reads it. The fastest way to walk a scene before you ever roll.