Storyboarding

What are they and what are they used for?
Storyboards are graphic illustrations of what your film sequence will look like. This helps you to organize and visualize what your film will be like. It also enables you to do a shotlist for the shoot which then helps you to keep an overall look over what has been done and what still needs to be done. Storyboards hepl greatly on set as well. They enable actors to know what they are doing, set designers to know what's in the shot and what isn't and it enables the technical team to set up more quickly as they already know what they are doing.

How to do it?
Some people believe that they need to be really good at drawing in order to be able to do this. That isn't true. If you can't draw you can either just draw absolutely necessary aspects or you could photograph mannequins, arranged to fit the set up of your scene. As the pictures are still it is difficult to show the actors' movements or any camera movement. This is often solved with the use of arrows to represent any movement going on in that shot. Since the storyboard just needs to enable you to drop your ideas down on paper, keep it small and don't use a lot of space. Also label your shots which makes it easier to refer to specific ones on set.