Collaboration is key to success on any video project, but sometimes it’s difficult to articulate the vision for a piece. Mood boards and storyboards help clients and video production teams clearly communicate their ideas and set the tone—in both visuals and content—for the project.
So first things first: What is a mood board?
A mood board is a collection of visual assets that summarizes the goal for a video’s aesthetics and emotions. This could include branding guidelines such as color schemes, graphic styles, or typography and fonts; logistic choices such as possible filming locations (office, outdoors, studio, kitchen, etc.) and set design elements; and more technical pieces such as examples for lighting, depth of field, framing, etc. The final board will be used as a guide during preproduction, filming, and postproduction processes, such as color grading, to ensure a cohesive and compelling final product.
You don’t need to be well-versed in technical video production jargon to understand what you see in a mood board, which is why it is a great tool for sharing the video production team's vision. What you approve on the board will inform the video team of the equipment they need to prepare to achieve your goals.
Naturally, the next question is: What is a storyboard?
Storyboards usually come after mood boards because they build upon that visual design framework. Most often, storyboards are sequential images or panels that depict key scenes planned for a video—similar to how stories are represented in comic books. This can range in formality from fully illustrated frames to quick sketches. They may also include photographs of locations, staged photos with people or set elements, and examples from other work. The goal of a storyboard is to show how scenes will work next to each other and, ultimately, how the story will flow. They can quite literally be shot-by-shot aligned with the script or be a representation of the storytelling approach, depending on what has been agreed upon.
To take it a step further, you can create an animatic by putting the static storyboard images on a timeline. This will give you an idea of the video’s timing and could uncover balance issues between scenes. Typically, we use animatics for motion graphics and animated videos, but that is not necessarily their only use.
Both mood and storyboards also function as checkpoints to ensure everyone is aligned. Make sure to give the team effective feedback to get to a mutual understanding faster and continue making progress on your project!